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COPyRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE DIFFERENT WEST 



THE DIFFERENT WEST 

As Seen by a 
Transplanted Easterner 

By ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK 



"O, East is East and West is West." 
— Kipling 




CHICAGO 

A. C. McCLURG & CO. 

1913 



■B7f 



Copyright 

A. C. McClurg & Co. 

1913 



Published February, 1913 



W. F. HALL PRINTING COMPANY, CHICAGO 

OCi.A34319-J 

/to/ 



PREFACE 

SOME readers will find fault with this book 
because it neither gives statistics nor quotes 
authorities. It is well to say, therefore, at the 
outset, that it is written for those who dislike both, 
and who like to read straight on without having 
their attention distracted by footnotes or figures. 
The author assumes full responsibility for what he 
says, and if he has inadvertently missed the truth 
upon occasion, doubtless it matters little. 

A. E. B. 



Contents 

Chapter V page 

The West's Political Unrest .... 47 

The first Western " insurgents" — Eastern 
and western ill-feeling — Western restless- 
ness — Movements from below upward — 
Democracy in the West — Bryan and Roose- 
velt — Socialism — The heritage of border 
lawlessness. 

Chapter VI 
The West's Economic Unrest .... 66 

Speculation — Hatred of "Wall Street"— 
The experimental temper — The western 
judiciary — The transportation problem. 

Chapter VII 
Education in the West 80 

Public education — Public recreation — State 
universities — Lack of traditions — Co-edu- 
cation — Faculty and student — Some com- 
parisons — Women's clubs and public libraries. 

Chapter VIII 
Literature in the West 95 

Boston's former primacy — Its passage to 
New York — Western writers in New York 
— Growth of local feeling — The business of 
publishing — Western journalism — "Boom " 
literature — Local character of the press. 



Contents 

Chapter IX page 

Science in the West io8 

Its practicality — Lack of popular apprecia- 
tion — Some western applications of science 

— Water purification — River transportation 

— Water power — Scientific agriculture — 
Irrigation — The smoke nuisance — Railways. 

Chapter X 
Art in the West 123 

Antiquities — Domestic art — Architecture — 
Galleries and exhibitions — Art production in 
the West — Public appreciation — Music and 
musicians — The theatre — Art instruction. 

Chapter XI 
Society in the West 138 

Social status a neglected subject — A sug- 
gested scale — Influence of occupation — of 
religious connection — Lack of a leisure class 

— Hospitality and neighborly feeling — Clubs 

— Local pride. 

Chapter XII 
Sources of the West's Population . . 154 

Relationships with the rest of the country — 
North and South — Foreign races — Jews — 
The French — Germans — Scandinavians — 
The Indian — The Negro — Lack of homo- 
geneity. 



Coti tents 

Chapter XIII page 

The Speech and Manners of the West i66 

Variants in American local speech — Eastern 
and western "tricks of speech" — Written 
and spoken language — School and family 
influence — The "American voice" — West- 
ern freedom of manner — Chaperonage — 
Working hours — Recreations — Conclusion. 



THE DIFFERENT WEST 



THE DIFFERENT WEST 

CHAPTER I 

SOME PRELIMINARIES 

MUCH ridicule has been heaped on the heads 
of travelers who, after a very brief sojourn 
in a strange place, essay to describe what they have 
seen and to comment on it. Obviously, knowledge 
gained in a few days cannot be thorough, but first 
impressions are of value, and they quickly die away; 
so that it is possible that the visitor of a day may 
have something to tell us that might quite escape 
the resident of ten years. It is not the rapid glance 
that constitutes superficiality; it is the mistaken idea 
that this glance may be made the basis of a thorough 
discussion. A lightning flash may reveal details of 
a landscape that are unnoticeable in a careful scru- 
tiny by noonday light; but one does not go to the 
view by lightning for topographical or geological 
data. 

This book assumes to give scarcely more than 
first impressions, except in the discussion of matters 
that are as patent in the East as in the West. 

And it is obvious that if we are to catalogue and 

1 



The Different West 



discuss the particulars in which the West differs 
from the East, our observer must be one who is 
familiar with the East. The foreigner, if he is an 
Englishman, notes first the aspects in which America, 
as a whole, differs from England; all states look 
alike to him. The typical American of the British 
novel, as has been amusingly noted in a recent maga- 
zine article,* combines the dialects and the manner- 
isms of Maine and Texas, of North Carolina and 
Arizona. If the foreign observer is a German, he 
is struck by any Anglo-Saxon peculiarity, including 
those that we share with our transatlantic cousins. 
To these a Frenchman or Italian is apt to add 
various Teutonic or non-Latin items. All of which 
is simply the elementary arithmetical truth that if 
you desire to find the difference between two quan- 
tities you must subtract one from the other; taking 
both from a third will be of no avail. And when 
one is a variable that rapidly approaches the other, 
as time passes, then the sooner the subtracting is 
done, the more nearly will the difference appear in 
its original amount. When the two objects to be com- 
pared — in this case the easterner and the westerner 
— are very nearly equal to start with, the approach 
due to contact is very swift. Differences that appall, 
amuse, or vex at the outset, are overlooked in a few 

*The Yankee in British Fiction, by Frank M. Bicknell. The 
Outlook, Nov. 19, 1910. 



Some Preliminaries 



months, and one soon forgets that they ever existed. 
The newcomer In Illinois or Missouri soon finds 
himself almost remembering that persimmons grew 
on the New Hampshire farm, and forgets that chest- 
nuts ever existed outside of literature. 

A Russian experimental psychologist, in a recent 
interesting series of investigations concerning the 
apprehension of numerical relations by animals, 
seems to have proved conclusively that dogs can 
count up to four. At least this is true if by " count- 
ing" we mean distinguishing that number of objects 
or events from other smaller numbers. The experi- 
menter, Zeliony by name, says that the impression 
made on the mind by any one of a series of events 
is colored by all those that have gone before : hence 
we are able to distinguish the fourth of a series, for 
instance, which has three predecessors, from the 
third, which has only two. 

In like manner, the impressions of a newcomer 
vary slightly with every day of his stay, even if they 
are the same objectively. The effect produced by 
looking down the same street is different on the 
second day from the first, and still more different 
on the third. This difference is not wholly due to 
addition of impressions; if it were so, the effect 
should grow stronger with time, whereas the reverse 
is generally true; perception becomes dulled with 
habit, details once noticed are blurred or smoothed 



The Different West 



over, and familiarity relegates the whole impression 
more or less to the subconsciousness. Recognition 
of detail thus grows up to a certain point and then 
fades. This point of maximum recognition is the 
one at which one should sit down to record his 
Impressions. 

The case is different with the recognition of rela- 
tionships, which requires thought. This usually im- 
proves with time. One's impressions of life in a 
foreign city might be more vivid and interesting in 
the first few weeks than at a later period; one's 
understanding of what it all meant might not be 
good within the year, and might constantly improve 
thereafter. 

The accounts written by foreign travelers of their 
first glimpse of New York from the bay, of the 
docks, of the drive through the streets to the hotel, 
of the reporter's first visit, and so on, are not only 
interesting, but extremely valuable; but when these 
visitors begin to generalize on short acquaintance, as 
they so often regrettably do, what they have to say 
is not so well worth while. 

When the writer of this volume has included in 
it more than first impressions he has tried not to go 
beyond the kind of generalizations that are made 
earliest and that are not far removed from the 
impressions themselves. 

The recorder of somewhat superficial impressions 



Superficial Impressions 



runs the risk, of course, of mistaking a local pecul- 
iarity for one that is common to a wider region; 
this he can avoid only by observing and comparing 
peculiarities in divers points of that region. 

I once knew a good lady from South Carolina 
who occasionally visited relatives in Waltham, Mass. 
She was a keen observer and discoursed freely on 
what she regarded as New England peculiarities. 
Some were such in truth, but most would have puz- 
zled the majority of New Englanders to recognize, 
being customs or idioms peculiar to Massachusetts, 
or to Waltham, or even, perhaps, to the family in 
which she visited. So our British cousin who has 
spent some time in New York returns to report the 
customs and peculiarities of that city as those of the 
United States in general. 

In order to avoid such a mistake, or at least to 
render its commission unlikely, it is not necessary 
that the traveler should visit every town, hamlet, and 
farm in the region of which he is to write. A 
somewhat wide sampling is all that is necessary. If 
we open a dozen cans, chosen at random from a pile 
of several thousand, and find tomatoes in all, we are 
justified in concluding — not perhaps that there are 
absolutely no peaches or pears in the lot, but at any 
rate that the tomato is abundant in the pile. So if 
one finds here and there throughout a region the 
same custom, the same trick of speech, he con- 



The Different West 



eludes that It is characteristic of the region. Our 
friend from Waltham, Mass., would not have con- 
fused the peculiarities of that town with those of 
New England had she made observations also In 
Burlington, Vt, Concord, N. H., and Waterbury, 
Conn. 

The time has now come for us to ask "What Is 
the West? Where, precisely, are Its boundaries?" 
A Chicago paper recently printed a clever cartoon 
giving a bird's-eye view of the United States, and 
showing a strip on the Atlantic coast surrounded 
by a high wall and labeled "The East," while the 
rest of the country bore the legend " Only the 
West." As a graphic delineation of eastern opin- 
ion this Is hardly an exaggeration, and the reason Is 
not far to seek. Our country began with a strip 
along the Atlantic, and the western edge of this 
strip was of course "The West." Central New 
York and Pennsylvania, and western Virginia, were 
all once on this western edge. The strip has wid- 
ened until It reaches from ocean to ocean, and it has 
necessarily done so entirely by westward extension 
of this edge, the eastern being fixed at the Atlantic 
coast. Hence every part of the country west of 
the original boundary has been successively "The 
West," and this shifting has been so rapid that a 
new strip has acquired the name before the older 
ones have had time to lose It. Hence It happens that 



Where Is the West? 



a New Englander still occasionally talks of "going 
west" to Buffalo, N. Y., and a Jerseyite will talk 
of his "western relatives" in Wilkesbarre, Pa. 

It must not be forgotten, however, that the 
expanding strip of American dominion did not pass 
over absolute wilderness. It overflowed and sub- 
merged, more or less completely, the French settle- 
ments in the Mississippi Valley, and the Spanish 
colonies in Texas and California. All these had 
already their own customs and their own points of 
view. To the St. Louisan, the Mississippi has 
always divided the East from the West, while to 
the San Franciscan the East has been as all- 
inclusive as the West has been to the Atlantic Coast 
dweller — hence the story of the two girls, one of 
whom had been East, to Denver, while the other 
had gone West, to Pittsburg. 

In selecting any one region of the country to 
describe by the name of "The West," one is thus 
confronted by an embarrassment of riches. The 
most reasonable criterion would appear to consist 
in asking the question "What region most fre- 
quently accepts the name as applied to itself?" 
Now we find that no matter how central New York 
and Pennsylvania are regarded by Atlantic dwellers, 
they never themselves acknowledge that they are 
"western," looking upon the term. Indeed, as 
involving a certain degree of opprobrium. Simi- 



8 The Different West 

larly, a Callfornian or an Oregonian seldom admits 
that he lives "in the West." His abode is in "the 
Pacific States," or "on the Coast" — a superb 
phrase whose magnificent disrespect to the Atlantic 
can not be too much admired. 

So far as I can find out, the only westerner self- 
confessed and unashamed, is he who dwells in what 
easterners call the "Middle West" — the great belt 
of states fringing the Mississippi on either side, 
especially about the country's middle latitudes. 
Here the denizens ask naturally, " How do you like 
it here in the West?" and speak of "us west- 
erners." They talk, to be sure, of "going west" 
when they entrain for Denver or Pueblo, but this 
is purely in a kinematic sense, and means merely that 
the train is to move toward the setting sun. Few 
would refer to Colorado, in a static sense, as "The 
West." 

Some dwellers in this region, it is true, object to 
the words "west" and "western," as applied to 
them and their states. I was taken to task not 
long ago by a Chicagoan of eastern origin for so 
using them. "The Central States," he maintained, 
should be the true term. Now this phrase, aside 
from the fact that nobody uses it, is not even 
descriptive. The " Central States" are those in the 
neighborhood of Colorado; certainly Indiana and 
Iowa do not belong to them. 



The Middle West 



Then an inevitable confusion with the so-called 
"Middle States" would result. As a matter of 
fact, names of this sort are traditional and habitual, 
and rarely descriptive; but the exchange of a famil- 
iar name that was once descriptive and has become 
non-descriptive only through changed conditions, for 
an unfamiliar one that never was and never will 
be descriptive, does not commend Itself. 

The "Middle West," then, is the "West" of 
this modest treatise — the West, whither its writer 
has been transplanted and to which, in common with 
its older inhabitants, he "points with pride." It is 
a land of whose differences there is something to 
say; were it not so, these pages would have no 
reason for being. But those differences, as they 
really are, are not as the eye of the westerner sees 
them, nor yet as that of the easterner beholds them. 
Perhaps the eye of the present writer has not dis- 
criminated them aright; it may take nothing less 
than the fabled Eye of Faith to view them as they 
are. At any rate, they are here set down as they 
obtrude themselves upon one person's consciousness. 
Like Luther, here he stands — on the banks of the 
Mississippi — he "can not do otherwise." 



CHAPTER II 

FLYING IMPRESSIONS 

WHEN Sylvia Pankhurst, the English suffra- 
gette, was in St. Louis, she addressed the 
members of the City Club, just after luncheon. As 
she entered the crowded dining room of the club, 
accompanied by two other ladies, those present 
naturally rose to their feet and so remained until 
the women were seated. What kind of treatment 
Miss Pankhurst had expected, I do not know, but 
she is said to have been deeply affected by this 
courteous reception — something, she said, that she 
had never experienced at home. It is to be hoped 
that she did not wrongly interpret it as a universal 
expression of sympathy with her ideas. 

In the course of her speech, when she was telling 
how the London bobbies had driven her suffra- 
gette sisters from their posts, she remarked, "but 
they came back." This bit of appropriate but quite 
unintentional slang was met with an instant roar of 
laughter and applause. The expression on the 
speaker's face was worth going miles to see. She 
saw she had made some kind of a hit, but she did 
not see why or how; and she was half Inclined to 

10 



Bluffs and Prairies II 

suspect that the demonstration was Intended to be 
unfriendly. Whether her American friends enlight- 
ened her or whether she is still wondering what it 
was all about, I do not know. 

These trivial incidents illustrate very well what 
the newcomer, especially the foreign newcomer, has 
to meet in the West — little differences from the 
treatment to which he is accustomed or from the 
environment with which he is familiar — differences 
so small that he is doubtful whether they exist or 
not, or is even unaware of their existence until the 
involuntary smiles of those about him lead him to 
investigate. 

The first differences noticed by a newcomer to a 
given region are those apparent to the senses, espe- 
cially to the sight; those of topography, vegetation, 
and climate. In the vast region that we have chosen 
to denominate "the West," there are no mountains 
and very few hills; whole states are nearly level 
except for the cuttings made by the rivers. Where 
these rivers are of any size the flat country is 
divided Into two levels: "bottom lands," the broad 
alluvial plains constituting the river's flood-area, 
over which it meanders almost at will, and the 
prairies at the level of the top of the bluffs. The 
transition from one level to the other, especially 
where the bluffs are soft and earthy and easily fur- 
rowed into ravines, is often beautiful and gives the 



12 The Different West 

impression of a hilly region. This may be near 
the river itself or it may be fifteen miles distant. 

The easterner's idea of the Middle West as a flat 
country is apt to receive a jolt when he visits, for 
instance, Alton, 111., a Mississippi River town that 
is as precipitous as Providence, R. I. The relation 
of river-bluffs to both prairie and bottom lands is 
often misapprehended, even by those who frequently 
pass over all three in railway journeys. 

Another misapprehension is that prairies are 
always flat. Bottom lands are necessarily so; the 
plains west of the Missouri are apparently so, 
although really they rise steadily in level to the foot 
of the Rockies where they are "mile-high." But 
prairies may be, and often are, lovely rolling coun- 
try, intersected by beautiful ravines. What makes 
them striking to an easterner's eye is the absence 
of rock. Such rolling country, brilliant green with 
young wheat, as far as the eye can reach, reminds 
one of a lawn, especially at a little distance, and an 
easterner can scarcely help having the impression 
that it has been cleared of stones and graded, at 
huge expense, whereas the configuration is perfectly 
natural. 

But even a flat region Is far from uninteresting. 
It gives one the impression of largeness and airi- 
ness that seems inseparable from the West. "You 
ought to see the country where we live," said a west- 



Bottom Lands 13 



ern farmer's daughter, " Why, it 's perfectly beau- 
tiful; it's just as flat as the top of a table." This 
girl would probably always regard hilly country as 
alien; interesting, perhaps, but not homelike. To 
thousands of our fellow citizens the rocky hills of 
New England are simply an infertile wilderness — 
difficult, monotonous, and disagreeable. 

A man loves the kind of country where he was 
born and bred: that is right; only he must not 
assume that those born and bred elsewhere should 
and do love his kind of country instead of their own. 
Both have their beauties, as even the discriminating 
stranger must acknowledge. The "American bot- 
toms" — the flood plain of the Mississippi on the 
Illinois side in the neighborhood of St. Louis, form 
an absolutely flat region of hundreds of square 
miles. There are few more impressive sights than 
this great plain, as viewed from the giant Indian 
mound near the banks of the Cahokia Creek, green 
with the new wheat, and dotted here and there with 
the smaller, but still great, tumuli of a vanished 
race. The indifference of the residents of the neigh- 
borhood to this region of wonders is astonishing. 
Fortunately it is as hard to destroy a tumulus as 
It Is to erect one, and the material — the common 
soft earth of the region — excites no one's cupidity; 
otherwise the mounds would have been leveled to 
the ground long ago. 



14 The Different West 

This softness of the earth, and its lack of stones, 
is also responsible for another feature that is noted 
at once by the eastern eye — the muddiness of the 
rivers. Clear water flows over rock from which 
all soil has long since been washed away; water 
running through an alluvial plain, shifting its course 
and washing away its soft, earthy banks, must needs 
be muddy, "What's that?" said a slum child on 
her first view of the Mississippi's brown, rolling 
flood, during a charitable "fresh-airing." "What 
do you think it is?" was the answering query 
from one of the fair patronesses. " I don't know 
for sure," rejoined the child, hesitatingly; "but it 
looks like coffee." It surely does; but it has beauty 
of its own for the eyes that are not disappointed 
because it is not something else. 

Some people ought to find fault with the sky be- 
cause it is not green like the trees. I have heard of 
a California woman who said she would object 
to the pearly gates of heaven if they were not made 
of the abalone shell of her native Pacific. And I 
have listened to loud complaints uttered because 
the Mississippi a thousand miles above its mouth 
is not as wide as the Hudson at New York! 

The great eastern rivers, so far as they are great, 
are not real rivers at all, but drowned valleys — estu- 
aries, arms of the sea, with salt or brackish water, 
slight current and tidal flow. The great western 



Rivers in the West 15 

rivers are as far from the ocean, and as independent 
of it, as the brooks; they are in fact huge brooks 
and resemble in no respect the navigable reaches 
of the Hudson, the Connecticut, or the Delaware. 

These differences have a wide influence on condi- 
tions of life. Those relating to the navigabihty of 
the rivers will be touched upon elsewhere, but those 
that affect the appearance of the streams as they flow 
past cities belong here. The easterner thinks of a 
navigable river as fringed with wharves as it passes 
a city — projections at right-angles to its banks. 
But in swift-flowing streams — brooks on a huge 
scale — varying in level perhaps forty feet from 
high to low water, such wharves are impracticable. 
On rivers like the Mississippi the sloping bank is 
simply paved to form a "levee" and the water 
comes up as far as it will, the boats with it. Steam- 
boats have long gangways slung from their bows, 
which can be let down either at levees or on any 
convenient spot along the banks where paved spaces 
do not exist, or wharf-boats are moored at the 
edge of the water and are hauled up and let out 
as it advances and recedes. 

A recent novel in which the hero starts on his 
career from St. Louis gives a stirring picture of 
the water-front there as the eastern author imagined 
it; the long wharves and the great steamers 
between them, hauling out into the stream as they 



1 6 The Different West 

start, just as they do in the North River at New 
York, or the Delaware at Philadelphia. If the 
author had ever seen one of the big western rivers, 
or had even read of the conditions that obtain along 
their banks, he would not have penned so absurd 
a passage. 

Next to topographical features the easterner is 
struck by differences of vegetation, and here we 
must exclude those due purely to differences of lati- 
tude. The dweller in the Northwest who visits the 
Southwest is struck, of course, by variations due to 
his southward travel — with these we have nothing 
to do. The most striking differences to the traveler 
along one parallel of latitude are probably those due 
to changed agricultural conditions, chiefly the huge 
size of the fields and the enormous areas devoted to 
one crop. 

In Illinois one may travel for hours without see- 
ing anything but corn and that in apparently limit- 
less areas. As one goes farther west, the wheat 
intrudes, takes the middle of the stage and then 
yields partly to alfalfa or other crops, but there 
is the same extent, the same impressive monotony, 
all of which is foreign to the East. In the case of 
natural vegetation there is hardly the same degree 
of noticeable difference, except to the botanist. 
Trees of the poplar family, such as the sycamore and 
Cottonwood, are more numerous; others, the maple 



Western Weather 17 

and the elm for instance, grow fewer. Strange wild 
fruits such as the persimmon are abundant; spring- 
flowering shrubs such as the red-bud give an unfa- 
miliar look to the woods in that season, yet taken 
by and large, vegetative nature does not obtrude 
her differences on the easterner, except perhaps in 
the parts of the bottom-lands given over to floods 
and abandoned for cultivation. Here there is a 
jungle of willows, wild vines, and the like, that gives 
a peculiarly savage and unfamiliar look. 

Variation of climate, like that of vegetation, 
which depends on it so closely, is of course less 
noticed when traveling east and west than from 
north to south or the reverse. The chief things 
that make that of the Middle West different from 
that of the East are the absence of mountains, the 
inland situation, and the fact that, as our weather 
moves from west to east, the West gets its storms 
and its hot and cold waves earlier. 

Absence of a great body of water near by, with 
its capacity for absorbing and storing heat, makes 
the climate on the same parallel colder in winter and 
hotter in summer. On a hot August day there is no 
chance that the wind by switching to the east will 
bring the cool sea air over the parched country; the 
familiar newspaper headline, " No Relief in Sight," 
has a more sinister meaning. At the same time the 
remoteness of great bodies of water lessens the 



1 8 The Different West 

humidity — that great terror of the eastern sum- 
mer and winter weather ahke. Fifty below zero in 
Minnesota may be merely stimulating, where twenty 
above in New York may seem unbearably cold. So 
also in the latter city the "scare" headlines in the 
papers begin to bloom at eighty-five degrees, where 
ninety-five degrees in dryer St. Louis scarcely brings 
them out. 

The absence of mountains means greater regu- 
larity in atmospheric disturbances — a tendency to 
follow the laws of meteorology without interruption. 
Here we may have a great cyclonic movement, 
around a center of low-pressure, a thousand miles 
in diameter, entirely over flat country. One of the 
things that happens according to regulation in such 
a vast cyclonic disturbance is the development of 
thunderstorms, tempests, and whirlwinds, in its 
southeast quadrant; and all these are more frequent 
in the West than in more broken country. Tor- 
nadoes do occur in New England and the Middle 
States, but no one thinks of taking out tornado 
insurance there, or of building "cyclone-cellars" for 
refuge, as is done regularly in many parts of the 
West. The sign "Tornado Insurance" on a busi- 
ness building is one of the things that gives the 
eastern visitor a mental jolt and reminds him that 
he has entered a region that is different meteoro- 
logically as well as topographically. What has been 



The West the Weather's Source 19 

said of the absence of bodies of water does not 
apply of course to the Great Lake region, where 
the effect of the lakes on the climate is similar, on 
a smaller scale, to that of the ocean; but this effect 
is purely local. 

The nearness of the West to the source of the 
weather is an influence that acts in the same direc- 
tion as its uniformity of surface. We do not know 
exactly how or why the great atmospheric whirls 
that we call cyclones and anti-cyclones begin, but we 
know that they start in the Far West and travel 
thence eastward across the continent. Our weather 
prediction is largely the art of watching them, track- 
ing them, and estimating when they will reach a 
given spot. When the disgusted citizen swears at 
the weather bureau it is apt to be because the erratic 
whirl with its attendant "weather" fooled the fore- 
caster by slowing up, or turning aside, or perhaps 
by melting away altogether. The nearer one is to 
the starting point the less chance all these accidents 
have to happen; hence the weather is somewhat 
more uniform in the West than in the East. Also 
the storms are more severe; the hot and cold waves 
are felt in their full force. 

Most of the differences mentioned in what pre- 
cedes do not depend on the hand of man; what is 
said of the crops constitutes the only exception. 
There are other differences, however, noticeable to 



20 The Different West 

the casual traveler as he glances from the car win- 
dow, that are artificial rather than natural. Farm- 
houses seem smaller and more infrequent. This is 
partly due to the vastness of the setting, which 
makes a normal house with its usual outbuildings 
seem insignificant; partly to the fact that the use 
of machinery in farm-operation has rendered a large 
resident staff unnecessary. It is only at harvest that 
an army of men must be employed, and these are 
hired temporarily, often from outside the boun- 
daries of the state. The country is familiar with 
the annual newspaper item to the effect that so- 
many thousand men will be required to harvest the 
wheat or corn crops in Kansas or Nebraska. These 
are all " emergency help." 

As the train passes through cities and towns the 
traveler notices that their immediate environs are 
not so well kept as in eastern cities. The outskirts 
of most American cities are discreditable: Boston 
is a shining exception. Possibly this condition is 
inseparable from continuous and rapid growth; and 
as this is taking place more rapidly in the West 
than in the East, it might be expected that condi- 
tions there would be even more unsatisfactory. 
Even the more remote suburbs, accessible by rail or 
long-distance trolley beyond the rim of immediate 
outskirts, are not in general so noteworthy as in 
the East. Chicago has some of great beauty on the 



Railway Peculiarities 21 

lake shore, but In general such suburban towns as 
those about Philadelphia or in the New Jersey and 
"Sound" environs of New York, are lacking. The 
suburb habit is not so fully developed. San Fran- 
cisco is much more like New York in this respect 
than any town in the West as we are using the 
term. In general the type of residence district that 
the easterner associates with a more or less distant 
suburb is to be found within the city limits in west- 
ern cities. In many of them, too, the private 
"Place," a short-parked street constituting a rus in 
urhe, is much in vogue and highly developed. 

Some of the most striking differences apparent to 
the traveler he will notice best from the rear obser- 
vation platform of his train. In the first place he 
will find that he is running on a single track, 
although he may be on one of the fast " flyers " with 
de luxe equipment. But the place of the second 
track will often be taken by a single-track inter- 
urban trolley road, whose rails parallel for miles 
those on which he is running. The roadbed is as 
good as that of the steam road on which he travels, 
sometimes even better. The cars are large and fine, 
and race successfully with the flyer, sometimes get- 
ting ahead of It. 

The development of these interurban electric 
roads has no parallel in the East. Their patrons 
use them for comparatively long trips and they even 



22 The Different West 

run sleepers whose conveniences are in some respects 
greater than those of the standard Pullmans. The 
interurban electric terminal in Indianapolis is a note- 
worthy building and one even more striking is to be 
erected in St. Louis, where the Illinois Traction Co., 
one of the largest of the interurban electric roads, 
has built an expensive bridge over the Mississippi 
for its exclusive use. 

Some of these items, briefly mentioned here, will 
be dwelt upon more at length in subsequent chapters. 



CHAPTER III 

THE east's misunderstanding OF THE WEST 

ONE of the most Interesting of Mr. Bryce's 
chapters is that on " The Temper of the 
West." In it, however, he commits the capital error 
of making his West too inclusive, his dividing line 
between it and the East being apparently the Alle- 
ghany Mountains. What he has to say of the West 
relates therefore sometimes to the Mississippi Val- 
ley, sometimes to the Rocky Mountain region, some- 
times to the Pacific Coast. At the present day, 
generalization that will apply to all three Is espe- 
cially difficult. The "temper" of the Pacific slope 
is not at all that of the Illinois and Indiana prairies. 
The underlying note of the chapter Is the effect on 
the westerner of his recent entrance Into a vast pro- 
ductive, but undeveloped region. This has doubt- 
less had its effect on the pioneer wave whose prog- 
ress westward from the Atlantic we have already 
noted. But that wave has long passed over the 
part of the country to which we have given the 
name of "West" In these pages. The temper of 
our "West" may be influenced by pioneer condi- 
tions, but hardly by such conditions in the present. 

23 



24 'The Different West 

I should say that the "temper of the West" is 
preeminently one of restlessness under restraint — 
of efforts at Independence in politics, of disregard 
of social and traditional curbs, of dislike of any- 
body or anything that tries to lead from outside or 
to impose restrictions of any kind. 

According to some writers we are developing In 
the United States a new national and racial charac- 
ter. This is a favorite subject with foreign 
observers. They pick out whatever they can find 
that Is weird or bizarre in our literature, our man- 
ners or our methods, and wonder whether It is not 
an indication that we are just about to turn out a 
new racial product. It used to be gravely asserted 
that If we were let alone we would be so affected 
by environment that we should gradually but per- 
manently take on the racial characteristics of the 
Indian. The American himself bothers little about 
his own peculiarities, least of all to inquire whether 
they are racial or accidental, but if a new product 
is really turned out by what Zangwill aptly calls the 
Melting Pot, we might expect It to appear first in 
the West and to look forward to the "temper" of 
that region as the transformed temper of the whole 
American people. 

This new national and racial character, according 
to G. W. Steevens, Is " an irresistible impulse to 
impress all Its sentiments externally by the crudest 



New Racial Characters 25 

and most obvious medium." Elsewhere he says we 
are 'Superficial," and complains of our "want of 
thoroughness." All this Is based on a misapprehen- 
sion — the same one that blinds the eastern eye on 
occasion when It gazes westward. The westerner, 
and In a lesser degree every American, has the gift 
of concentration, and he has the defects of this 
great quality. He sees one thing at a time — the 
thing that he is trying to do. Just now he is bent 
on material progress, so he neglects the finer arts of 
civilization. Our critics mistake this concentration 
of our efforts on one thing as a manifestation of 
some change In our character, as if a boy who suc- 
cessively devoted his eager attention to making a 
hen-coop, playing ball, and studying his lessons, 
should be regarded, by a solemn observer, as chang- 
ing his character from that of a designer and 
constructor to that of a devotee of recreation and 
again to that of a student. The westerner espe- 
cially bends his energies to what is before him, and 
he recks little of what may be beyond his horizon. 
"It is pathetic and exasperating," wrote Richard 
Harding Davis, in his West from a Car Win- 
dow, when Oklahoma City was only three years 
old, " to see men who would excel in a great metrop- 
olis . . . wasting their energies in a desert of 
wooden houses in the middle of an ocean of prairie, 
where their point of view is bounded by the railroad 



26 The Dijf event West 

tank and a barb-wire fence." This is a character- 
istic eastern view. That Oklahoma City would grow 
in twenty years' time into the large, handsome, well- 
ordered, and altogether creditable place that it is 
today, Mr. Davis probably did not dream; had he 
done so, he might have thought that the work of 
assisting in so marvelous a development was great 
and important enough even for "men who would 
excel in a great metropolis." But the difference 
between the eastern and western attitude is that the 
westerner sees clearly the possibility of such growth 
where it exists, and regards the attempt to realize it 
as something worthy of his best endeavor. He may 
fail; but the gambling spirit is strong enough in his 
veins to regard this only as an additional incentive. 
He might " excel in a great metropolis " ; it is doubt- 
less his intention to do so; but he prefers that the 
metropolis should be one of his own building — a 
tour de force, one day open prairie bounded by tank 
and fence, the next a well-paved, solidly built com- 
mercial and residential city. 

"No one ever lost," said a great American finan- 
cier, "who bet on the United States." The west- 
erner realizes this more vividly than his eastern 
brother, and he Is especially ready to bet on the 
West. His faith may be childlike, but his winnings, 
so far, have been anything but juvenile. 

If asked to state briefly the sahent peculiarities of 



Alliterative Epithets 27 

the West as distinguished from the East, the man-in- 
the-street of New York or Boston would probably 
reply, after some cogitation, that it is "wild" and 
"woolly." Now these somewhat vague adjectives 
were doubtless chosen at the outset for alliterative 
reasons — just as the East is "effete" largely be- 
cause both words chance to begin with E. But there 
is nothing that makes an adjective so sticky as allit- 
eration — those initial letters seem to have hooks 
like burrs — one can not get rid of them. Their 
logical applicability is quite beside the mark. 

Shorn of alliterative "aptness," the alleged wild- 
ness and woolliness of the West seem to refer 
merely to the fact that it was more recently settled 
than the East; that the wave of colonization moved 
westward, not eastward. But time is a great equal- 
izer. A boy of five and one of fifteen are hardly 
in the same century, whereas the selfsame Individ- 
uals at fifty and sixty are contemporaries. So the 
West in its pioneer days was in a different age 
from the East — already well settled and civilized, 
whereas a time must inevitably come when the wave 
of settlement and civilization will stand as high on 
the register on one side of the Alleghanies as on the 
other. Has this time arrived? This much, I think, 
may surely be said: the differences between West 
and East are no longer due to the fact that the latter 
is the elder. The most obvious difference between 



28 The Differ ent West 

our boys of five and fifteen Is due to the ten years' 
seniority of the latter; when they are sixty and 
seventy they may still differ in marked degree, but 
the seniority, while it remains absolutely the same, 
has become relatively unimportant. 

A vast deal of nonsense has been and Is still talked 
about "new countries." One would think that our 
emigrant ancestors at once retrograded to mon- 
keys when they touched American soil and that we 
had been painfully trying to get back our ancestral 
British manhood ever since; also that our more 
recent sires took another backward step in the evo- 
lutionary pathway when they removed to Milwau- 
kee or St. Louis. When the Latin poet said that 
you couldn't change a man's spirit by taking him 
across seas, he spoke eternal truth; and a thousand 
miles or so of hill and prairie are similarly powerless 
to set back the hands on the dial of his development. 
The "civilization" of New York is just as old as 
that of London, and that of Chicago Is as ancient 
as either. They are different — but the difference 
Is not one of seniority; the time is past for that. 

The West, in fact, has taken on quite as " old " an 
aspect as the East. It seems absurd to use such a 
word of New York, where the whole city above 
Canal Street has sprung up almost within the mem- 
ory of those now living, where whole districts are 
leveled to the ground and rebuilt In a brief tale of 



'New'' Countries 29 



years, and where vast regions In the Bronx, covered 
one day with pastures and truck gardens, are trans- 
formed as by magic in a few months into solidly 
built blocks with paved streets, parks, and all the 
concomitants of settled city life. It would be easy 
to pick out tumble-down districts in Chicago, Mil- 
waukee, or St. Louis far older in atmosphere than 
these. As for smaller places, the difference lies, per- 
haps. In the greater decrepitude or lack of self- 
respect of certain western towns and villages. It is 
possible for a New England town to remain small 
for a century without losing Its dignity or Its legiti- 
mate pride. This may occur also in the West; but 
in the large majority of cases it would seem as if 
failure to expand carried with it the loss, or per- 
haps the failure to acquire, these qualities. These 
places are withered before they are ripe; senility 
overtakes them before they have enjoyed a well- 
considered and respectable middle-age. They are 
slatternly, dirty, and slack — and no one cares; why 
should anyone care, since the place hasn't grown 
since 1873? All this the East misunderstands, In 
much the same way as Europe misunderstands us 
all — East and West together. To the European 
eye we are all crude, unkempt, and slovenly — to- 
tally occupied In dollar-chasing. Nor Is this the 
only particular In which the East-and-West relation 
is similar to the English-American. 



30 The Different West 

The ability of eastern people, for instance, prop- 
erly to estimate those from the West suffers from 
very much the same cause that makes it hard for 
the English to "place" Americans. In England 
certain things very nearly always go together. For 
instance, certain grades of education, social posi- 
tion, and good-manners. From an Englishman's 
manners It Is reasonably easy to Infer at once his 
position and education, and from his education his 
social position generally follows. It used to be so 
also with political position and Is still so to some 
extent. Membership in the House of Commons, for 
Instance, once always Implied social Influence and 
the degree and kind of education and breeding that 
went with It. These things are not so with us, and 
In the West still less than the East. The English 
traveler In the United States meets a man of good 
education and Is scandalized, perhaps, to see him 
eating with his knife. He meets a Member of Con- 
gress and Is surprised to hear him murder the 
King's English. His Inferences are at once, though 
wrongly, detrimental to this country. Placing his ac- 
quaintance In the English class In which his higher 
grade accomplishment or position would Indicate 
that he belonged, the traveler concludes that at least 
some members of that class in America are far below 
the English standard. It would, of course, be 
equally logical to "place" the man by his low-grade 



Education and Manners 31 

accomplishment and then conclude that members of 
that class were superior to the corresponding per- 
sons in England. For Instance, instead of classing 
the illiterate congressman with the English polit- 
ically dominant class, it would be possible to grade 
him with the English uneducated class and then point 
out that while in England members of that class 
do not usually show enough ability to elevate them 
to elective office, they frequently do so in the United 
States. 

The fallacy in both ways of looking at the facts 
lies, of course, in the assumption that the same 
things characterize the same classes here as in 
England. Nowhere in the United States may we 
infer a person's social or political standing from his 
education, or any of the three from his manners, 
but it is possible to go farther in this direction In 
the East than In the West. The easterner knows 
what are the limitations of the method In his own 
section, but within those limitations he attempts to 
employ It In the West precisely as he would at 
home, and fails in the same way the Englishman 
does. 

On the other hand, the westerner may make the 
converse mistake in the East, just as the American 
does in England. Unaccustomed to any fixed con- 
nection between political status, social position, man- 
ners, and education, he fails to infer one from the 



32 The Different West 

other, and causes the same astonishment as if he 
had failed to conclude from the appearance of a 
man's head above a wall that a man's body was 
beneath. Human heads do not grow In England 
on the bodies of oxen or elephants — but they do 
in America, especially in western America. 

Another cause of misunderstanding between East 
and West Is the inevitably strained relation that 
always exists between a colonizing and a colonized 
country, or part of a country. The colonizers be- 
come cool a little before the colonists do. The kit- 
ten is still looking upon the mother-cat with trust 
and affection at the epochal moment when the latter, 
recognizing that the time for dependence is over, 
turns a cold shoulder to her offspring and returns 
its overtures with a vicious sputter or a cuff on the 
ear. This doubtless seems rather hard to the kit- 
ten. " Perhaps you were right to dissemble your 
love," she might quote, "but why did you kick me 
downstairs?" It is, however, the way of the world. 
We loved our British mother dearly when she began 
the series of cuffs and sputterings that ultimately 
drove us from her door. Even when she was fight- 
ing us with tooth and claw and we, to the best of 
our infant ability, were biting and scratching back, 
we could not bear to think that It might all result 
in a separation. We have never forgotten that we 
are mother and daughter, but the attitude engen- 



Colonizers and Colonized 33 

dered by the cuffings and scratchlngs has never 
wholly passed away — the superciliousness on the 
one side — aptly characterized by Lowell as "a cer- 
tain condescension" — due to a motherly contempt 
for kittenish behavior, remaining long after it has 
been outgrown; and a certain amount of suspicion 
and dislike, curiously mingled with respect and 
admiration, on the other side. 

Now as a general rule two regions on an east and 
west line in the United States bear to each other the 
relation of colonizing and colonized regions, and the 
feeling between them shows a trace of that relation. 
There has been no separation and there have been 
no scratches and bites — except perhaps in the pub- 
lic press. Despite all this, however, it is easy for 
the westerner to detect in the East the same attitude 
of condescension that Lowell noted in foreigners, 
and his own attitude is correspondingly marked by 
what may be called a reluctant respect tinged with 
distrust. The condescension, slight as it may be, 
involuntary and unnoticed as it may be on one part, 
is infallibly detected and resented on the other, all 
the more as the conditions and relations that en- 
gendered It have long been outgrown. 

In particular, while the East is fully cognizant of 
the West's progress and while her increasing regard 
and appreciation grows with this progress, what the 
electricians call "hysteresis" is only too plainly 



34 The Different West 

visible — a lagging behind of the appreciation as 
compared with the progress. This lag may be 
roughly estimated at about twenty-five years: the 
average easterner who has not seen for himself — 
and some who have seen, but not with the eye of 
understanding — thinks of Chicago, St. Louis, and 
Kansas City as they were about 1885, or even 
earlier. He does not know for Instance that St. 
Louis has practically abandoned her old residence 
district and built up a new one of great beauty, dif- 
fering in toto from the old; he thinks that steam- 
boats still run up the Missouri River; he knows 
nothing of the great playground system of Chicago, 
with Its wonderful " field-houses " putting New York 
and Boston to shame; he Is Incredulous when he 
hears of the admirable park and boulevard system 
of Kansas City; to his mind the great and growing 
western state universities still stand as they did 
when Michigan was the only one worth speaking of. 
Washington Avenue, St. Louis, has such a pave- 
ment as Fifth Avenue never had and possibly never 
will have; but he thinks of It as deep In mud. It 
was, once ; but that day Is long past. 

Charles F. Lummis, himself transplanted, but 
almost too thoroughly acclimatized, says that the 
trouble with easterners Is that they " come to the 
West with their brains In a tin can — and they forget 
to bring the can-opener." Going back to our elec- 



Contemplation and Actuality 35 

trical metaphor, this simply means that the hystere- 
sis in the eastern brain, as it contemplates things 
western, is regrettably persistent. It may seem 
curious, or even inexplicable, that this "lag" so evi- 
dent in the easterner is absent, or exists to a very 
slight degree, in the westerner as he contemplates 
the East. Sometimes contemplation runs even 
ahead of actuality, as it did in the case of a San 
Franciscan acquaintance of mine who thought he 
was riding through the New York subway when 
the surface-cars took him through the old Fourth 
Avenue tunnel, years before the subway was run- 
ning. There is really nothing remarkable about 
this. The line of relationships between two places 
nearly always has polarity as well as direction; its 
two aspects are different. The New Yorker will tell 
you that it is very much farther from New York to 
Brooklyn than it is from Brooklyn to New York. 
So it is with East and West. The westerner is only 
twenty-four hours from Broadway; the Bostonian 
or Philadelphian is generally a whole lifetime away 
from Chicago or Kansas City. The westerner keeps 
in touch with the East through business trips, and 
social visits, and vacation sojourns; his newspapers 
tell him, in a somewhat distorted way, what is going 
on there; his understanding and appreciation of 
what is going on in New York or Washington is 
quicker and juster than the easterner's of what is 



36 The Different West 

happening In Cincinnati or St. Louis. In other 
words, "lag" is sHght; there is little or no hystere- 
sis. It is not altogether absent — but that is for 
another chapter. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE west's misunderstanding OF THE EAST 

"T TRUST you won't get like the New Yorkers," 
-■- says Honora's aunt to her in Winston Church- 
ill's last (and best) book. Honora is leaving St. 
Louis for the East. 

"Do you remember how stiff they were, Tom? 
. . . And they say now that they hold their heads 
higher than ever." 

"That," said Uncle Tom, gravely, "is a local 
disease, and comes from staring at the high 
buildings." 

This represents pretty accurately the average 
snap-judgment of westerners. To the question 
"What is the chief characteristic of the East?" nine 
out of ten would be apt to reply: "The people 
there are stiff." Pressed for details, the speaker 
might amplify his position somewhat thus: "They 
are cold, unresponsive, unneighborly. It is difficult 
to get acquainted with them. They have no depth 
of emotion. They seem to be considering personal 
advantage all the time." And more of the same 
sort. This is a misconception, as every easterner 
will agree. It arises from a false inference from 

37 



38 The Different West 

conduct to motive. Judged by what the westerner 
is accustomed to In his own section, the easterner 
certainly lays himself open to misconception of this 
kind, but In this Instance, as In others, appearances 
are deceitful. Let us take another case: The Eng- 
lish books tell us much of the curious Yankee — the 
man who Insists on Inquiring at length about your 
intimate affairs. I have been about the country as 
much as most persons and I have lived many years 
in Yankeedom, which Is the land of my forefathers; 
but I have never happened to meet this gentleman. 
Far be It from me to assert that he does not exist. 
He may once have been a type, but his apparent 
curiosity, I will venture to say, was not curiosity at 
all — only compliance with what he regarded as a 
custom of courtesy. Europeans are annoyed by 
what they regard as the Impertinent questions of 
the Chinese when members of that race Inquire 
"Are you married?" "Why don't you get mar- 
ried?" "How many children have you?" "Why 
don't you have more?" and so on. The Celestial 
Is simply being polite, according to his customs; he 
doesn't really care about these things any more 
than did the old Irishwoman who asked "And how 
is your health, Mrs. Mullaney? Not that I care 
a snap; but only to make conversation!" 

It used to be considered polite to show the utmost 
interest In the affairs of the person addressed; now, 



Deceitful Appearances 39 

that interest must be limited to his health and that 
of his relatives. Intimate friends may go farther; 
but only in Oriental circles is it proper to inquire 
why he does not marry. On the other hand, it is a 
deadly insult to ask a Mussulman about his wives. 
Truly, the customs of courtesy are strange things. 
They differ more In Europe and Asia than they do 
in Massachusetts and Missouri; yet even in two of 
these United States there are subtle variations that 
may be the causes of serious misapprehension. If 
of two men who sit down with you in the smoking- 
room of a Pullman, one enters at once into conver- 
sation while the other sits silent, it Is unjust to con- 
clude either that the one is loquacious or that the 
other Is morose; each Is simply doing what he has 
been taught to consider the polite thing under the 
circumstances. The talkative man may really feel 
like keeping quiet; the silent one may be bursting 
with speech. Each may thus be sacrificing his in- 
clinations on the altar of politeness. When two such 
men m.eet, each sets the other down as a cad, owing 
to ignorance of causes. 

This is why a certain kind of easterner and a 
certain kind of westerner, who may or may not be 
typical, make a mistake when they conclude, respect- 
ively, that the easterner is a cold, silent fish, with- 
out feeling, and that the westerner is a man who 
presses himself upon his neighbor with unnecessary 



40 (The Different West 

insistence. Their conceptions of human intercourse 
are different — that is all. The westerner is the 
more human and the less artificial; he may congratu- 
late himself on that; but the easterner, underneath 
his mantle of aloofness, assumed purely as a mat- 
ter of custom, may, in reality and by nature, have 
quite as much cordial feeling as the other. 

There is a condition of things where two human 
beings, meeting for the first time, at once find them- 
selves not only on a footing of acquaintance, but of 
mutual confidence and intimacy. For instance, these 
two individuals may be alone and in a position of 
danger; they may be travelers in the frozen North 
or the wilds of Africa; they may stand together on 
the roof of a burning house or on a floating ice- 
floe. In such situations the ordinary standards of 
Intercourse and customs of courtesy are thrown to 
the winds. Many a novelist has utilized this fact, 
as we all know. The reason for it is that the con- 
trast with the harsh conditions of nature emphasizes 
the common humanity of the two strangers and mini- 
mizes all the differences between them that might 
have made cooperation, or even mere acquaintance, 
Impossible under normal conditions. In a less de- 
gree this same force draws together two civilized 
men among savages, two Europeans in Asia, or even 
two Americans In England. Now the westerner Is 
not so far removed in time from a state of society 



Conditions of Intimacy 41 

where relations such as these obtained generally as 
is the easterner. The ancestors of both were in a 
case when they were glad, in their primitive wilder- 
ness, to give a hearty welcome to a casual comer and 
make friends with him shortly, but the necessity for 
this ceased a century ago in the East, while it per- 
sisted in the West perhaps fifty years longer. And 
while it persisted it set the standard, even for those 
personally unaffected by it. Hence it has been con- 
sidered the proper thing much longer in the West 
than in the East to speak to the casual stranger, with 
whom one is thrown on a journey or by any other 
chance, and to make of him a temporary friend. In 
the East this custom has largely passed, and two 
men who meet thus estimate each other's perma- 
nent possibilities of comradeship before they do 
more than pass the time of day. 

A westerner once stated the case thus: In the 
West we assume that a man is well bred and com- 
panionable until he proves himself the contrary; if 
he does so disappoint us, we drop him, of course. 
But in the East a stranger is assumed to be objec- 
tionable until he shows himself to be otherwise, and 
until he comes forward with his proofs he is a 
pariah. To a people that prides itself, even over- 
much, on holding a man innocent till his guilt is 
proved, this way of putting it will appeal strongly; 
yet both attitudes are quite logical. The eastern 



42 The Different West 

attitude, however, is adapted to a well inhabited 
country whose citizens brush up against each other 
constantly; it is not fitted for a sparsely settled 
region where it would be difficult to establish one's 
antecedent^ and relationships. I once ran up against 
an unknown cousin on a railroad train in Kansas; 
but that was an unlikely chance, whereas in a New 
England community one has to tread warily to avoid 
stepping on the toes of all sorts of blood relations. 

Now the West is indeed no longer sparsely set- 
tled; the conditions there today are not widely 
different from those in the East; yet just because 
the customs engendered by other conditions have 
not had so much time to adjust themselves, the west- 
erner is friendly and the easterner comparatively 
wary, and the former will naturally regard the lat- 
ter as hostile and forbidding unless he knows some- 
thing of social causes. 

A westerner, in whose judgment I have confi- 
dence, surprised me the other day by some remarks 
about the East. Had I remained simply one of his 
eastern friends, doubtless I should not have heard 
them; but transplantation brings many experiences, 
and the pleasure of hearing an impartial estimate 
of one's former neighbors is one of them 

The East, said my friend, was full of lazy and 
incompetent persons; one saw them on every hand 
in passing through New England or the Middle 



Two Attitudes 43 



States. It could not be otherwise, he went on; all 
the wideawake, able citizens had abandoned those 
effete regions and had moved to the West, where 
alone one may now travel about without having 
one's vision offended with slatternliness, incompe- 
tency, and laziness. I could not help a sly glance 
to see whether he was not joking — but he was as 
solemn as a judge, and his tone rasped a little with 
that asperity that I have often heard in western 
judgments of the East. So I merely agreed with 
him to avoid argument and wondered at the lament- 
able blindness of sectional feeling. It must be 
that at the end our population, stirred by the Inces- 
sant whipping of our railway trains, will be lashed 
out of such parochialism. Then perhaps Americans 
will not believe that every Englishman drops his 
/f's; Englishmen will not be sure that the Penn- 
treaty Indians still live In Philadelphia. Then, too, 
citizens of distant sections of the United States will 
not credit all sorts of absurd things about each 
other. 

My friend's argument was. It Is true, quite valid; 
but not as between the East and the West as we 
have defined It. As before noted, these sections are 
approaching each other In relative age. It stands 
good only in the comparison of an older community 
with one in its earlier generations, perhaps I should 
have said in Its original or first generation — a Wyo- 



44 The D liferent West 

ming cowboy district of the seventies, perhaps. 
Such a district has no timid citizens, no lazy ones, 
no incompetents — that is, when the particular kind 
of competence valid in those regions is meant. But 
as soon as there is marriage and the begetting of 
children the law of atavism asserts itself; some of 
the children inherit their father's traits, but others 
go back to those of their grandsires. — those in- 
competent and lazy persons left behind in the East. 
And in the West this atavistic process has now 
gone on for many generations. Added to the mix- 
ing action of our easy transportation systems it has 
brought about a ratio of incompetency to compe- 
tency, of laziness to industry, and of cowardice to 
courage, that is not very far different from that 
obtaining on the Atlantic coast. We have here one 
of the few instances of the "hysteresis" defined in 
the last chapter, operating in the West — the lag of 
thought that throws back conditions, in mental ap- 
preciation, to what they were a decade, a lustrum, 
or even a century ago. 

Another source of western misconception of the 
East is the tendency to take the East at its own 
valuation. This is perhaps most noticeable only 
among those who have not visited the East, but it 
extends further than this. The East, of course, 
thinks that the history of the United States is that 
of the Atlantic coast. The parochial doings of 



The East's Self-appreciation 45 

petty magistrates are of vast concern there, but what 
was happening in other parts of the continent at 
the same time does not matter; those regions are 
worth noticing only when they become part of the 
Union. This is particularly the case in New Eng- 
land. There are many good citizens of Massachu- 
setts who think that nine-tenths of all the important 
things that ever happened to our country occurred 
in that state. As for Boston, Dr. Holmes's remark 
about the Hub of the Universe, which has passed 
into our literature as a pleasantry, is no joke to 
many, but sober earnest. 

It is curious to see these views accepted calmly, 
without surprise or resentment, by westerners, in 
somewhat the same spirit as the traditional account 
of the Noachian flood is accepted by many. In par- 
ticular, the primacy of Boston seems to be unques- 
tioned. It is assumed that all New Englanders have 
the same reverence for that town that is felt by 
her own citizens; that they are familiar with the city 
and accept its claims as meekly as the English do 
those of London. To some extent, it is assumed 
that any easterner will entertain like feelings. 

As a matter of fact, all easterners, except possibly 
the Bostonians themselves, are familiar with the 
resentment felt everywhere with the Boston attitude 
and claims. There are other cities in the East and 
there are even a few in New England. Capitals 



46 The Different West 

like Hartford and Providence, towns like Portland, 
New Haven, and Burlington — all have something 
to say on the subject. Just as there is no one city 
related to the United States as London to England 
or Paris to France, so there is no one town bearing 
this relationship to the whole of New England. 

Big things show best at a distance, and there is 
lack of knowledge throughout the West of the char- 
acteristics of small eastern towns. Places like 
Springfield, Mass., Scranton, Pa., or Rochester, 
N. Y., have ten times the individuality of a huge 
metropolis like New York. The individuality is less 
marked in western towns of this size; hence the 
western inability to place such communities properly 
in the scheme of things eastern. 



CHAPTER V 

THE west's political UNREST 

npHE widening movement of the strip of states, 
-^ which has carried its western edge continually 
farther westward, has not been unchecked. It has 
paused more than once at natural obstacles until the 
colonizing motor-force could gather strength to 
surmount them or burst through them. So the tide 
stopped for a time at the Alleghanies, again at the 
Mississippi, again at the Rockies, and in the " Great 
American Desert." There have been times, then, 
when the regions on either side of these particular 
boundaries have with more than usual appropriate- 
ness been known as "East" and "West." It was 
during the first of these pauses that the typical 
"western" spirit of uneasiness, unrest, and dis- 
satisfaction first found expression in open violence, 
in what is called "the Whisky Insurrection." Here 
the "East" put down the "West" by force of 
arms — a feat that It has never since been called 
upon to perform, though it is difficult to say what 
might have happened if the greater differences 
between North and South had not thrown all others 
into the shade during just those years when the 

47 



48 The Different West 

East-West boundary was shifting westward. Even 
since the close of that contest It has been predicted, 
now and again, that East and West would one day 
also come to blows. In a book of Impressions 
of America, published in London in 1868, Mr. 
George Rose, an English observer, speaks confi- 
dently of "the coming struggle" between these two 
sections, and uses these words: 

Whenever these two incarnations of self — the western 
and eastern men — shall come into collision, then will 
human nature be seen in its basest colors : then will 
avarice, envy, and hatred, ranked on both sides, meet in 
a deadly conflict, the horrors of which will be unmiti- 
gated by either fear of God or human respect. 

We may smile at this, but it is unique rather in 
its wording than in its underlying idea. 

To return to the Whisky Insurrection, this first 
and most explosive of eastern and western differ- 
ences has left its impress on that particular part of 
the country where It occurred. Whatever differ- 
ences there may be between East and West, they 
exist almost as strongly between eastern and western 
Pennsylvania as between New York and Indiana. 
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are hardly in the same 
country and the local feeling between the two sec- 
tions has more than once given expression to a 
sentiment that the State should be divided. Pos- 
sibly only our American love for bigness still keeps 



Sectional Hostility 49 

the great State of Pennsylvania a unit. The antago- 
nism that was at the bottom of the Whisky Insur- 
rection, however, moved westward with the moving 
east-and-west line of division. At bottom It was the 
feehng that the stronger East was not fair to the 
West; that It was doing things In the way that was 
best for Itself rather than for the country as a 
whole; that it was opinionated. Intolerant, and 
altogether Irritating. As the West grew stronger, 
the shifting line added more and more territory to 
what came to be considered as "The East." This 
territory assumed "eastern" ways and eastern 
modes of thought, and the eastern preponderance 
was thus maintained. It was the old story of the 
Socialist who modifies his opinions as he becomes 
a large property-holder, of the pedestrian whose 
point of view changes when he buys an automo- 
bile, of the British Whig politician who becomes a 
Tory when he Is raised to the peerage. And In 
addition to this political preponderance of mere 
voting strength there came to be added a financial 
preponderance that was even more Irritating. 

The way In which the West regards the East has 
thus apparently a somewhat complex source — so- 
cial, political, and economic — but at bottom these 
are all very much the same. 

Politically the restlessness of the West has always 
manifested Itself In eagerness to enter Into move- 



50 The Different West 

ments for reform, sometimes with rather ill- 
considered haste, in refusal to follow leaders of 
social prominence, in the hasty setting up and pull- 
ing down of popular idols. Movements from below 
upward, instead of from above downward, have 
been apt to sway it. Its leading men, willy-nilly, 
have gone with the masses oftener than they have 
persuaded the masses to follow them. It cannot be 
said, perhaps, that reform movements have been 
more effective in the West than in the East. There 
have been rotten municipal governments, senatorial 
election-scandals, wholesale bribery, in both sections. 
It is rather the way in which reform movements 
are conceived and carried on that marks the differ- 
ence between them. 

For instance, the abolition movement in Boston 
was at the outset a movement of socially prominent 
persons. The mob was against It. When it was 
triumphant it was because its leaders had brought 
the mob around. The "Liberal Republican" move- 
ment that resulted in the nomination of Horace 
Greeley v/as similarly from above downward; it did 
not get far enough downward, in fact, to win the 
votes. So with the innumerable campaigns against 
Tammany, which have been largely led by " silk- 
stockings." So with the policies identified in New 
York with the administration of Governor Hughes. 
This state of things has always given color to the 



Reform from Below 51 

assertion by machine-men, stand-patters, Tammany- 
ites, etc., that their opponents were self-righteous 
Pharisees — " hoHer-than-thou " men, undemocratic, 
and opposed to popular government. Just after one 
of the earlier periodical overturns of Tammany in 
New York, a professor in Columbia University 
remarked that he found suddenly that he began to 
have the pleasure of knowing a large number of city 
office-holders. There had been, in fact, a social 
revolution. Tammany had been overturned from 
above downward, which is the one very good reason 
why it never stays upset. Tamen usque recurret, 
which may be read as a pun or not, just as you 
choose. 

Curiously enough, one of the places where it is 
easiest and most instructive to compare eastern with 
western spirit and methods is at the great eastern 
universities, which for reasons that need not be dis- 
cussed here, are those that draw their students most 
generally from all parts of the country. For this 
reason, it may be said in passing, a man may well 
decide to send his son to Harvard or Yale or Prince- 
ton, rather than to a local eastern college like 
Amherst or Williams, or to one of the great west- 
ern state universities, like Wisconsin or Illinois. 
The opportunity that one gets at a continental as 
opposed to a local institution, to live and exchange 
opinions daily with north, south, east, and west. 



52 The Different West 

may well outweigh considerations based on curricu- 
lum, size, situation, or administration. It is greatly 
to be regretted that since the Civil War southerners 
do not flock to these universities as they used to do. 
So far as I know there is no institution, unless it 
may be Johns Hopkins, where one may meet large 
numbers of persons from both North and South. 
For the East and the West, however, what has been 
said holds good. I well remember that my first 
class reunion at Yale was held in the stress of the 
Mugwump secession from Blaine to Cleveland in 
1884, and the impression is still strong of the dif- 
ferent attitudes toward it of my classmates from the 
East and from the West. The class was Repub- 
lican by a large majority — so large that when we 
formed campaign marching clubs in the Garfield- 
Hancock contest of senior year, the Democrats had 
just enough men for oflUcers — there were none left 
for the rank and file. Almost without exception, 
among my own friends, the western Republicans 
were Blaine men, and the easterners were Mug- 
wumps. And neither could at all understand the 
attitude of the others. It was in the eastern and 
western air. Possibly this may seem quite contra- 
dictory of what has been just said. Not at all. 
We represented the top, not the bottom. " Mug- 
wumpery," which has grown powerful under vary- 
ing names, is today stronger in the West than in 



Political Movements 53 

the East. My western friends, some of them high 
in the councils of their parties, have been dragged 
into it by forces from below, so far as they have 
not been able to resist these by " standing pat." 
The easterners have not generally been able to 
carry the masses with them into insurgency. Where 
this has been done, as in New Hampshire, it has 
been distinctly by successful leading from above, not 
by a mass-movement from below. 

Now compare, if you please, with the eastern 
movements to which we have briefly alluded, west- 
ern ones like the sudden rise of the Populists, the 
recent successes of the Socialist party in various 
cities, the influence of Bryan, the reform of the 
tariff, the commission form of government, the so- 
called "Insurgent" movement, with its corollary 
the Progressive party — the idolizing of Roosevelt. 
To a much greater extent than the corresponding 
eastern movements, these had their origin in popular 
sentiment, which had well leavened the masses and 
made them ready to accept leadership when it 
appeared. This sort of thing, of course, puts a pre- 
mium on hypocrisy among political leaders; men 
like La Follette In Wisconsin and Cummins in Iowa 
have been accused of it: but if these accusations be 
true they are only additional evidence of the way 
in which the western movements arise. 

Occasionally the West tries the eastern plan of 



54 The Different West 

organizing reform from the top, and the failure of 
such attempts is sufficient proof that they are exotic. 
Two conspicuous recent instances are the defeat' of 
Professor Merriam for the mayoralty of Chicago 
and the rejection at the polls of a new charter for 
the city of St. Louis. Both the candidacy of Pro- 
fessor Merriam and the new charter were, actually 
or reputedly, it makes little difference which, aristo- 
cratic in their origin and tendencies. The success 
of both would have made for civic righteousness 
and advancement; failure in each case was a dis- 
aster, and it may be set down to the credit of those 
who have apparently forgotten that in the West, 
nothing, no matter how good, can be forced on the 
people from above. 

The fate of various elaborate city plans may be 
similarly explained. It seems to have been assumed 
in various quarters that an imitation of certain 
externals in other cities will bring about a corre- 
sponding change in fundamentals. For instance, 
there is little spectacular street and cafe night-life 
in St. Louis — a fact much to its credit. Its citizens 
have attractive homes and prefer to spend their 
evenings therein. But business men often lament 
this state of things because it makes deficient the 
entertainment of traveling salesmen and buyers. 
An imitation of New York's "Tenderloin" is evi- 
dently required. The brilliant street-lighting being 



City Plans 55 

the most obvious feature of that celebrated district, 
it has been assumed that if sufficient light were pro- 
vided, all the rest would follow, oblivious of the fact 
that the light in New York is a product of the 
Tenderloin life, not its cause. Considerable sums 
have thus been spent not only in St. Louis, but in 
other cities, on brilliant street-lighting, much to the 
improvement of the streets, of course, but absolutely 
without the creation of a "Tenderloin." 

So with "city planning." The real "city beauti- 
ful" is usually an outgrowth of conditions, and the 
creation of certain architectural features will not 
serve to create also these conditions. The mag- 
nificent civic improvements planned by architects 
for the great western cities are not only largely 
impractical on account of expense, but they do not 
correspond to any need felt by the great body of 
the citizens. The practical way, and the one that 
accords with western ideas and methods, is to bring 
about a change of public opinion in regard to one 
detail after another that is making the city ugly, 
and so transform it gradually, instead of trying to 
replace a section of it with a section of Paris, 
leaving the rest untouched. 

It is a pleasure to turn to a set of Institutions 
that have been initiated and carried forward In a way 
more consonant with western ideas. These are the 
city clubs, organizations, generally of younger men, 



'snr^ 



56 The Different West 

whose object is thoroughly to ventilate all ques- 
tions relating to civic matters, without taking sides 
in any of them. These bodies are catholic in their 
membership and are beginning at the bottom in 
quite the proper way. Much may be expected from 
these and similar efforts. 

It has been intimated above that the West is more 
democratic than the East. Democracy must have 
leaders, but it makes a great deal of difference 
whether those leaders be chosen or self-imposed. 
Geographical conditions doubtless have something 
to do with these differences. Democracy can not 
flourish well under fear of foreign invasion, and this 
fear, whether consciously or not, is an inherited 
habit of mind on every sea-coast. Plainsmen, and 
dwellers in the river-bottoms, like mountaineers, 
" are always freemen." It will not do, of course, 
to push this idea too far, but it may be noted that 
just after the civil war, when militarism reigned 
supreme, in the Mississippi Valley as on the Coast, 
the popular movements that have always character- 
ized the West practically ceased to arise. Every- 
body seemed to be " standing pat," and the military 
insurgency of the South, by its effect on those who 
helped to put it down, seemed to have had a blight- 
ing effect, for the time being, on western political 
insurgency. 

It has been made clear, I trust, that the western 



Western Democracy 57 

democracy does not reject leaders; on the contrary, 
it idolizes them and follows them blindly. But they 
are its own leaders, and they stand for its own prin- 
ciples — the simple secret of their Influence. The 
two patent examples in recent times are William J. 
Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt. Belonging to 
nominally opposed political parties, each has repre- 
sented the popular and radical wing of his party 
and has stood especially for those ideas that are 
rife in the West. Bryan has openly accused Roose- 
velt of stealing his policies. It would be nearer the 
truth to say that both have borrowed those policies 
from western public opinion. Roosevelt usurped 
Bryan's place in the western heart because he was 
successful. Democracy adores success and looks for 
a leader that can succeed; It will depose one after 
another till It finds him. Whether Roosevelt's fail- 
ure to secure a third term in the presidential chair 
will hurt his western popularity, remains to be seen. 
Possibly not; for his successes in the late campaign 
were in the West; his failures In the East. The 
essential " westernness " of Roosevelt has often 
been remarked. For years his personality has been 
the one political subject that would stir up a social 
gathering in the East. We may refuse to be moved 
by the tariff, or Imperialism, or the prospects of a 
war with Japan; but If somebody says " Roosevelt," 
everyone is in arms at once — the East generally on 



58 The Different West 

one side, and the West on the other. Anti-Roosevelt 
westerners usually turn out to have railroad or cor- 
poration connections. I have traveled day after 
day in a suburban train to and from New York 
when everyone in my car was discussing Roosevelt — 
and the first syllable of that word might well be 
omitted. The curses in this case were loud as well 
as deep: the one or two Roosevelt advocates in the 
car were fairly scared into silence. Yet at this time 
the general popularity of Roosevelt throughout the 
country was unexampled, and it was particularly 
the West that was its seat. We hear much of the 
compelling effect of his magnetic personality, but 
that never seemed to count for much among the 
Wall Street crowd; and if Roosevelt had been 
another Ballinger, it would have gone for nothing 
among his present admirers of the Middle West, 
although it has undoubtedly added to the general 
effect. 

No; Roosevelt's present position (for he still 
holds it as a western leader), like Bryan's former 
position, is due to the fact that he is an exponent 
of policies that fall in with the peculiar political 
unrest of which we have been speaking. 

I shall doubtless be reminded here that Bryan's 
influence rose on the crest of the free-silver wave, 
and that Roosevelt has always been a consistent 
opponent of free silver. Precisely; and the substi- 



Theodore Roosevelt 59 

tution of Roosevelt's influence for Bryan's coincides 
with the abandonment of the free-silver idea in the 
West. Political unrest focused itself for a brief 
time on this point and then dropped it when it was 
unsuccessful. In this abandonment of the West's 
once dominant idea, Theodore Roosevelt played 
absolutely no part at all. 

In attempting to sum up the West's political 
unrest, I am reminded of Professor Franklin Gid- 
dings' answer to the editor of a Socialist paper 
who asked him if he were of the faith. Professor 
Giddings said (I quote from memory) : "If belief 
in what Socialists are trying to do, as opposed to 
the ways in which they are trying to do it, makes 
one a Socialist, then I am a Socialist." This, I 
take it, is the fundamental attitude of the West, 
whether fully acknowledged or not, and the leaven 
is working eastward, also. The assets of Socialism 
are two — its grievance, which is a universal one, 
and its offer of a definite cure. This cure is of the 
nature of a panacea, the age-long stand-by of the 
quack. The scientific physician knows that there is 
no such thing; he realizes that every malady must 
be studied and treated by itself. The suffering 
patient knows this too, perhaps — theoretically; yet 
if he is on his last legs and the quack comes along 
with his cure-all, the patient is very apt to give it a 
trial. So, when we are on our last legs, we may 



6o The Different West 

turn In despair to the Socialistic cure-all — probably 
not otherwise. Meanwhile, Socialists of varying 
schools are proposing all sorts of policies and expe- 
dients that they conceive to be consonant with, or 
to be steps toward, their general plan. Some of 
these are obviously good, some doubtful, some 
foolish, and some mischievous. The American 
people, especially In the West, are approving and 
adopting many of these, and those who do not like 
it are shouting " Socialism ! " This cry Is not fright- 
ening westerners at all, and I do not believe that 
It will ultimately frighten anyone, east or west. 
Latin nations are apt to give their adherence to 
general principles and then blindly accept whatever 
policy may seem to correspond with them. Anglo- 
Saxons have never done this; they examine each 
policy on Its merits and adopt It If they like It, 
without regard to whether or not It may be con- 
sidered socialistic, capitalistic, idealistic, material- 
istic, or atavistic. The attitude of " show me," 
assumed traditionally by MIssourlans, is really 
characteristic of Anglo-Saxon civHization. 

The grievance that the Socialistic cure-all is 
designed to correct Is, as I conceive it, the fact that 
the rewards of effort are unjustly distributed. When 
we come to define equitable distribution, then we all 
part company; but most of us agree that the present 
arrangement Is inequitable. Some would assert that 



Socialism 6 1 

any possible arrangement is inequitable, while others 
would say that an equitable distribution is within 
the bounds of possibility. The Socialists go fur- 
ther: they say that they can define equitable distri- 
bution (though they do not all do it in the same 
way) and that they have discovered a sure means of 
bringing it about. The western attitude is some- 
thing like this: those who hold it recognize the 
injustice of the present state of things and sympa- 
thize with efforts to make it better; but they regard 
it as a group of phenomena each of which must be 
dealt with separately and experimentally. Anything 
that seems likely to work in the direction of partial 
and local alleviation is willingly tried. Hence we 
have commission forms of government, the eccen- 
tricities of the Oklahoma constitution, bank-deposit 
guarantees, hotel inspection, the initiative, referen- 
dum, and recall, woman suffrage in several states, 
drastic railway regulation, and many other such 
expedients. 

In The Land of the Dollar, a book which, 
belying its somewhat flippant title, is one of the 
most appreciative short estimates of our country, 
the author, the late G. W. Steevens, writing during 
the McKinley-Bryan campaign of 1896, speaks as 
follows : 

For the first time, the East and West find, or believe 
they find, their interests sharply and diametrically op- 



62 The Different West 

posed. And I own it does not appear to me the best of 
augury for the ultimate unity of this country that each 
side appears more set on beating down the opponent than 
on trying to conciHate his interests with his own. I have 
not noticed, for instance, that the RepubHcans have put 
out any ahernative poHcy to reHeve western agriculture, 
nor that the Democrats have devised any expedient, in 
the event of their success, to break the fall of eastern 
business. 

The election was won by the Republicans. What 
would have happened if the other side had been 
victorious, we need not discuss. But western agri- 
culture is not only "relieved" but is extraordinarily 
prosperous and as satisfied as any restless American 
industry can be. Some will say that this is because 
" Providence looks out for children, drunken men, 
and the United States;" but another adage tells us 
" God helps those who help themselves," and I pre- 
fer to think that we fall into the latter category 
rather than into the " shorn-lamb " class to whom 
the wind is tempered. Napoleon is said to have 
asked first about every man to whom his attention 
was called, "Is he lucky?" He was quite right. 
A man's "luck" is usually the excuse given by his 
incompetent friends for some special ability and its 
satisfactory results. The western farmer has doubt- 
less been fortunate, but I can not help thinking that 
he himself has had something to do with it. And it 
is quite possible that after the contest the victors 



Western Luck 63, 



themselves turned their attention to that conciliation 
of interests, of whose absence during the campaign 
Mr. Steevens complains. This Is quite in accord with 
the customs of all good fighters. When the fight is 
on, they fight; the time for conciliation does not 
arrive until the issue has been decided. 

This chapter began with an allusion to some early 
western political unrest that bore fruit In armed 
protest. "The voice of the West," said Woodrow 
Wilson on a western trip In 191 1, "Is a voice of 
protest." In the Kansas-Missouri border warfare 
just preceding the civil war, the irrepressible conflict 
between North and South broke out In a character- 
istic western way. The influence of such lawlessness 
as this Is hard to eradicate. It showed itself in the 
career of the James brothers and of others in more 
recent times. In certain regions of the West as 
nowhere In the East, there are persons with the 
true brigand spirit of Italy and Corsica. The train 
robber, to them, is one of their own people, 
misguided perhaps, but to be sympathized with, 
concealed, and even admired. This spirit is dis- 
appearing, but It still exists. "They value good 
government," says our kindly critic, Mr. Bryce, 
"but they are tolerant of lawlessness that does not 
directly attack their own Interest." 

Most western lawlessness is a survival, and It 
survives not so much from tolerance of the kind 



64 The Different West 

mentioned by Mr. Bryce as because the western 
states do not possess the machinery for its suppres- 
sion. That machinery is not created because, after 
all, the lawlessness is sporadic and it does not seem 
worth while to mount a siege-gun to kill a grass- 
hopper. This may not be the right way to look 
at the matter. A little abnormal lawbreaking, 
especially if it tends toward brigandage, will give 
a black eye to a community that is normally quiet 
and peaceful. A train robbery here, a mountain 
feud there, will create the impression of utter dis- 
regard for order, whereas there may be more actual 
crime in proportion to population in a week of 
New York than in a year of such a region. Take, 
if you please, train robbery — a crime more fre- 
quent in the West than in the East, partly because 
of the facilities, for both commission and escape, 
offered by more sparsely settled country and partly 
as an inheritance from former frontier or border 
lawlessness. To do away with highway robbery 
of any kind, of which train robbery is but a species, 
a local police or constabulary is totally insufficient. 
An organization covering a wide extent of terri- 
tory — a state or national police like the Cuban 
Rurales, the Texas Rangers, or the Pennsylvania 
Constabulary is needed. But shall such an organi- 
zation be created to stop an occasional train 
robbery? The western states have evidently de- 



Lawlessness 65 



cided that it would be a waste of money to do so, 
Texas had her border conditions to care for: Penn- 
sylvania her mining territory; a state police has 
paid them where it might not pay Iowa or Mis- 
souri or Kansas. This may be bad argument, but 
it is the argument that makes conditions what they 
are, whether it has been definitely formulated or 
not. Fortunately, whenever a train robber inter- 
feres with the mails, the Federal secret service at 
once takes the matter up and, not being hampered 
by local conditions, generally runs the culprits to 
earth. And if it comes to capture, the robber pre- 
fers Federal custody, for in some western states 
death is the penalty for his crime, whereas Federal 
law prescribes only imprisonment. It is a curious 
commentary on the feebleness of local authority, in 
the face of this type of offense, that the train robber 
has vastly more fear of the Federal detective, with 
imprisonment as his only weapon, than of the local 
police, capture by whom means the gallows. 

Lawlessness such as this, however, is rather a 
relic of past political unrest than an indication of 
the present variety, which has nothing in common 
with it. The politics of the West will continue 
strenuous so long as its temper is unchanged, but 
we shall have no more v/hisky insurrections, no 
more border warfare, and, it is to be hoped, no more 
bandit "brothers" of the James and Younger type. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE west's . ECONOMIC UNREST 

npHAT the speculative element can never be 
-■- eliminated from commercial transactions goes 
without saying. It is present even in so elementary 
a case as the purchase of food for one's own use, 
without thought of selling: for whether one spends 
much or little for a given amount depends on the 
state of the market. The prudent man will lay in 
an extra stock of non-perishable goods when prices 
are low — that is, when they are as low as he thinks 
they are likely to go. Whether he is right or not 
depends partly on his judgment, partly on chance. 
There will be many who are not prudent enough to 
do this, or who do not trust their own judgments 
sufficiently to attempt it. It would seem eminently 
proper that others who are prudent and who do 
trust their own judgment should be able, by buying 
and reselling to the Ignorant or timid ones, to make 
the profits that these either do not know how to 
make, or are afraid to make, for themselves. From 
such operations as these we may advance by almost 
imperceptible steps to the worst forms of wild-cat 
speculation, which few would hesitate to call gam- 

66 



IVall Street 67 



bllng, pure and simple. The line must be drawn 
somewhere, and the place for drawing it must be 
selected more or less arbitrarily. 

This selection involves the personal equation. 
The Wall Street man, who lives in an atmosphere 
of speculation, will not draw it in the same place 
as the Missouri farmer, in whose commercial trans- 
actions chance plays a relatively unimportant part. 
A creditor and a debtor would not be likely to agree 
on the place to draw it; still less the members of a 
creditor class and a debtor class. Now, until very 
recently the western farmer was always a borrower. 
His property was mortgaged and he was continually 
paying interest to eastern capitalists. It seemed to 
him, rightly or wrongly, that conditions were so 
manipulated and rates of interest so adjusted, in 
eastern financial circles, as to keep him always a 
debtor and to make him pay high for the privi- 
lege. Matters have changed now: the Kansas and 
Nebraska farmers have paid off their mortgages, 
have money in the bank, and own automobiles; but 
hard feelings engendered by conditions do not 
always disappear with the alteration of those 
conditions. 

Some of us still lay up against our English cousins 
the fact that they objected, with force of arms, to 
our independence, despite the fact that we have now 
possessed and enjoyed it for nearly a century and a 



68 The Different West 

half. It Is possible that the western farmers' feel- 
ing against "Wall Street" will last as long as this, 
and if conditions should ever become unfavorable 
again, that feeling will be intensified. At present 
it is also kept alive by the tariff. Despite efforts 
to persuade the farmer to be a high-tariff man, 
increased protective duties on imports have been 
generally due to the efforts of manufacturers. The 
East has been more thoroughly and consistently 
protectionist than the West, and the western farmer 
has been a low-tariff man on economic grounds, 
whatever his political affiliations. 

Of course, the "Wall Street" that Is detested 
and feared in the West is the whole body of eastern 
financial and industrial influence — the influence of 
the money-lender, the high-tariff manufacturer, the 
manipulator of markets, the maker and controller 
of trusts. All of these occupations, it is true, are 
now indulged in by westerners also. More shoes 
are made in St. Louis than in Boston ; the " corners " 
of the Chicago exchanges rival those of New York; 
the trust extends its wings over the West as well 
as the East. But as in the case of other grievances, 
the feeling lasts longer than the conditions that give 
rise to it, and the western feeling against " Wall 
Street" is very real and very important. Griev- 
ances of this kind, real or fancied, become, after 



Freak Laws 69 



long nursing, the causes of great political or 
economic upheavals that are precipitated by some 
apparently trivial Incident. It was not the greasing 
of the cartridges that made India flame out into 
mutiny, or the passage of the Stamp Act that severed 
our bonds with the Mother Country, or the elec- 
tion of Lincoln that brought about secession. These 
events were due to long-continued tension that was 
bound to find relief in one way if it did not in an- 
other. Possibly the tension in the West may never 
result In any great upheaval, but it has had impor- 
tant political results In the past and may conceivably 
have others in the future, before it is relieved. Some 
of these results are Populism, the Free Silver move- 
ment, " Insurgency," and others dwelt upon with 
more detail in the last chapter. Be this as it may, 
it Is certain that the East greatly underrates this 
tension, largely because of Its inability to under- 
stand it. 

One cause of this inability is the fact that in the 
East there are fewer points for a movement to 
crystallize upon than in the West. Chemists know 
that a solution may remain supersaturated for an 
indefinite time, until a tiny crystal is dropped in, 
when solidification, proceeding from that crystal as 
a nucleus, begins at once. The East may be super- 
saturated with feeling — jealousy, or fear, or indig- 



yo The Different West 

nation, but there are no nuclei to start that feehng 

into activity. These nuclei are furnished, in the 

West, by the tendency to try experiments. 

G. W. Steevens says: 

Kansas has been the drunken helot of American poli- 
tics. " Here 's a law ; let 's enact it," has been its continual 
watchword. ... In the last few years [prior to 1896] 
it has given its allegiance to four new political parties. 
These were the Farmers' Alliance, the National Alliance, 
the People's Party, and the Silver Party. None of them 
did any good. 

All this puts in somewhat exaggerated and strik- 
ing phraseology the restless, experimental temper 
that is doubtless characteristic of Kansas, but no 
more of her than of her neighbor states. This 
tendency, which is peculiarly an American trait, 
appears in the adoption of woman suffrage in a 
few western States, the success of prohibition in 
others, such "freak" constitutions as that of Okla- 
homa, and more recently in the Socialist victory in 
Milwaukee. No one in the West believes that a 
majority of the Milwaukeeans suddenly became at 
this time disciples of Lassalle or Karl Marx. They 
had tried both the old parties, with unsatisfactory 
results, and began experimenting on the third — 
that is all. This entry of Socialism into the domain 
of practical politics is looked upon in the West as 
rather a good thing than otherwise. The abolition- 
Ism of Lincoln was a different thing from that of 



The Western Judiciary Jl 

Garrison; the prohibition spirit of Georgia is not 
that of Neal Dow. Nor is the socialism of Victor 
Berger that of the preachers of a somewhat abstract 
social revolution. 

The westerners, as has already been said, like 
abstract principles; they enjoy tackling separate 
problems in their own way, and will go far and act 
rashly in experimenting on solutions; but they object 
to set programs. This temper results, like all experi- 
mentation. In failures and even In disasters; but it 
also results In the acquisition of knowledge that can 
be obtained In no other way — in ascertaining, for 
instance, those localities where prohibition will work, 
the cities that can be governed on the commission 
plan, the possibilities of such schemes as the bank- 
deposit guarantee of Oklahoma, the mild character 
of an avowedly Socialistic municipal government. 

Now, under these circumstances, when the mind 
of a community is under tension, successful experi- 
ments of this kind serve as lines of least resistance, 
along which relief may be afforded; or, to use our 
recent simile, as nuclei upon which crystallization 
may relieve supersaturation. One of the most in- 
teresting points to consider In this connection Is the 
composition of the western judiciary and the atti- 
tude of the western people toward it. The judiciary 
is much nearer the people in the West than in the 
East. Its character Is not, on the whole, as high, 



72 The Different West 

but it is regarded with more friendliness, if with 
not so much awe. It is uniformly elective, and 
there has been much rotation in office, so that almost 
every passable lawyer in the community has sat on 
the bench at one time or another, and judges are 
as numerous as colonels in Kentucky. This has its 
disadvantages, but in certain conditions it is an 
advantage. It is as fortunate a thing for a judge 
to have the community on his side as it is for a 
governor or a mayor. This viewpoint will not 
appeal to those who regard a judge as a stern re- 
pressor of a wicked and untoward generation rather 
than as the living voice of the community's subli- 
mated common sense. 

This idea seems to be that the law is a definite 
thing and that the task of finding out what it is is 
like a mathematical problem. Obviously, if this 
is correct, the personal or political bias of the judge, 
his birth, breeding, education, affiliations, and modes 
of thought have absolutely nothing to do with his 
decisions. He ascertains what the law is and makes 
declaration thereof — that is all. The trouble is 
that the personal equation so obviously does enter 
into it all that he who runs may read. Two mathe- 
maticians may, in solving an intricate problem, arrive 
at different results, but it is always possible to find 
out which is right and to demonstrate it to the other 
in such a way as to force his acknowledgment. No 



Eastern and Western Radicalism 73 

such thing has ever been possible in law. Doubtless 
the law is definite within certain limits, but those 
limits allow for plenty of "lost motion," and this 
is where personal, political, or sectional bias comes 
unconsciously into play. Theodore Roosevelt has 
always seen this, and his keen perception of it has 
led to his so-called " attacks on the judiciary." The 
Arizonans saw it when in their new constitution 
they extended the principle of the recall to their 
judges. It is hopeless to expect that the judiciary 
of a whole section can remain free from influences 
that pervade it, and I believe that western judicial 
decisions reflect in many cases the restless temper, 
the tension, the supersaturation that has been de- 
scribed. The most radical decisions under the 
Sherman law, the pure food law, railway legisla- 
tion, etc., have been in the West. This does not 
mean that the West is dissatisfied with the judiciary 
or with the place it has come to occupy in our system 
of government. It reserves the right to criticize or 
condemn a judicial act as it does an executive or a 
legislative act. It may make up its mind that a 
given judge is incompetent and should be replaced. 
It may even be in favor of applying the "recall" 
to the judiciary — a perfectly logical position in 
cases where the judiciary is elective — but it has 
no intention to belittle the functions or dignity of a 
judge. 



74 The D liferent West 

In an address before a western club, an eastern 
radical recently made an attack, on the judiciary — 
on the whole position that it has come to occupy in 
our system — that, under the guise of logic and 
fair-mindedness, was little short of revolutionary. 
To judge by the way in which it was received, the 
West does not sympathize with this sort of thing. 
The matter may be worth a few words, as it illus- 
trates the difference between the individualistic, 
almost anarchistic, radicalism of the East and the 
collectivist, social, or civic radicalism of the West. 
The speaker's attack on the courts was in the guise 
of a protest against undue veneration of the United 
States Supreme Court, but was in fact an assertion 
that no one but the disputants in a suit should pay 
any attention to the decision of a court in that suit. 
The Supreme Court has no prerogatives not pos- 
sessed by other courts, except that it is higher than 
they. They must all decide questions in accordance 
with the law, and in so doing it frequently becomes 
necessary for them to decide what the law means or 
whether the law-making body, when its jurisdiction 
is limited as is that of Congress, went beyond its 
powers in some instance, making its acts of no effect. 

Now, after such a decision it is, of course, theo- 
retically possible for another suit, involving pre- 
cisely the same questions to be brought, and 
another and another, each of which would be 



Eastern and Western Radicalism 75 

decided in the same way. It is much easier and 
less expensive, however, to recognize this fact and 
shape our conduct according to the first decision, 
just as it is wiser for a goat who butts his head 
against a wall to stop right there and not repeat 
the act indefinitely. Such acceptance of the situa- 
tion is a civic act. It is better for the community, 
though it may not suit the Individual, who may 
prefer to have his own turn at the game of litigation. 
This latter method is quite familiar in the criminal 
law. Jones steals money and goes to jail; and, 
Smith, Brown, and Robinson, in turn, do precisely 
the same thing and are served in precisely the same 
way. This is surely anti-civic, and to extend the 
custom to civil procedure would seem to a layman 
no less so. 

But this is not the worst of It. The speaker 
would have had the Executive of the United States, 
after the Supreme Court, in the course of litigation, 
had decided that Congress went beyond its powers 
in passing an income-tax law, and that therefore 
such law was void, continue to collect the tax, letting 
Individuals continue, as they desired, to bring the 
matter into litigation, but disregarding every deci- 
sion as applicable only to the case in hand. This 
is so thorough a reductio ad ahsurdum of the whole 
contention that it is probably unnecessary to pursue 
It further. So extended reference to it Is excusable 



76 The Different West 

only because it may serve to show what I believe 
is a fundamental difference between the radicalism 
of the East and that of the West. The former is 
that of individuals and is hence individualistic; the 
latter is that of coherent bodies of men or of 
communities, and hence is social. 

Of course, this kind of an attack on the judiciary 
is a totally different thing from that attributed to 
Mr. Roosevelt. The prerogative of criticizing 
judges, or mayors, or selectmen, is freely exercised 
by all, from ex-presidents down to the solons of 
the corner grocery, and will probably be exercised 
by all so long as " Freedom from her mountain 
height" continues to watch over our liberties. 

Much economic unrest at present is very inti- 
mately bound up with the transportation problem. 
The general feeling that the railroads are not deal- 
ing fairly with the public is shared with the rest of 
the country, but somewhat intensified by local condi- 
tions and by the general attitude of protest so com- 
mon in the West. It has come to the surface 
especially in efforts at rate regulation, which the 
railroads resent as ill-considered, and which are 
perhaps not well-considered, or indeed considered at 
all, being merely somewhat blind attempts to " get 
back" at the roads. The roads are at last begin- 
ing to realize that they are unpopular, though they 
profess not to understand why. I heard a railroad 



Feeling Against the Railroads JJ 

official say recently that a great strike of railroad 
employees is inevitable. The demands and beha- 
vior of the men are becoming unbearable, he said. 
The railroads meekly yield to the one and suffer 
the other because they know that in any contest the 
public would be against them. "The strike will 
come whenever we are ready to make a stand," 
said he. "And when we get the public to looking 
at matters from our standpoint, just see how quickly 
we shall bring it on!" An unconscious tribute to 
public opinion and a recognition of how that opinion 
regards the roads. As a relief from their exactions, 
some are looking forward with hopefulness to the 
resumption of river transportation. The only way, 
however, in which the railroads have killed river 
transportation is by furnishing something better, as 
noted in another chapter. Hope for still better 
conditions is justifiable, but longing for the old river 
days is foolish. Those who wish to ship goods by 
boat may still do so; the charges are less than by 
rail, but the insurance brings them up in excess of 
the railway rates. This simply means that shippers 
are not content to send their goods in the kind of 
boats and under the conditions of loading, trans- 
portation, landing, and temporary storage on shore 
that obtained in the old days. Betterment of these 
conditions will result in lowering the insurance rates 
and making the cost of river transportation really 



yS The Different West 

lower than that by railway. With all this the rail- 
road has had little to do except to create a higher 
standard of speed and safety for freight. So far 
as the rate question is concerned, the shippers' side 
of it is given very forcibly in Norris's novel, The 
Octopus. All that the railroad can say, on the other 
side, is that it wants only a fair return on its capital. 
What this return ought to be, however, is something 
that no two persons will figure out in the same way, 
since no two can agree on what it ought to be based. 
The public demand for a physical valuation of 
these and other public service properties is very 
loud and insistent in the West; and it is doubtless 
a proper and inevitable step as a necessary factor 
in the determination of equitable rates, whether or 
not these are to be based directly upon it or no. 

It should be noted that absentee landlordship 
plays an important part in western feeling toward 
western railroads. The roads are now largely con- 
trolled by easterners, and the public can scarcely be 
expected to look upon the property of Gould or 
Harriman as it might on something owned and 
operated by its friends and neighbors. When any- 
thing is done to hurt the railroads, they cry out 
against the injustice done to the "widows and or- 
phans" who own them. When those widows and 
orphans also control them, doubtless we shall see 
the West exercising more chivalry in its acts toward 



Absentee Railway Owners 79 

the roads; but at present they seem as mythical as 
their real owners are distant. Of the physical con- 
dition of the roads and the way in which they are 
run, something is said In another chapter. 



CHAPTER VII 

EDUCATION IN THE WEST 

MR. BRYCE, in his just and sympathetic 
account of the United States, comments on 
the fact that our educational institutions, of which 
we speak more modestly and with greater hesita- 
tion than about any other feature of our national 
existence, are the very thing that most commands 
the admiration of the outsider and inspires him 
with the greatest confidence in our future. 

These institutions, both lower and higher, have 
changed even since Mr. Bryce wrote his book; they 
have been developing and, on the whole, improving, 
even in the East; but in the West the changes have 
been in some respects rapid and radical. 

The increased respect shown for the public school 
by well-to-do people — what may be called a rise 
in its social status — has been notable in both sec- 
tions, but especially in the West. I well remember 
New England towns of my boyhood where, in spite 
of much alleged pride in the " district school " 
system and much talk of its being the bulwark of 
our liberties, no well-to-do person would have 
thought for an instant of sending his children t® 

80 



Public Education 8i 

a public school. Today, in those same towns there 
are good graded schools to which all elements of 
the community send pupils — an advance in democ- 
racy when it would least be expected. But in the 
West, instruction through public channels has always 
been respected. There as elsewhere, private schools 
will always be preferred by certain persons, but this 
preference is not widespread. This may be a reflec- 
tion of the excellence of public school instruction, 
but in part, also, it is a cause of that excellence, 
and due to the general temper of the people. In 
general, the grade of teachers is apt to be better 
and the character of the buildings higher than in 
eastern communities of the same grade. Where the 
community is poor or ignorant, the schools will be 
bad, of course — East or West. 

In the extension of school activity in the direc- 
tion of facilities for recreation, the West is far 
ahead of the East. Nothing like the Chicago play- 
grounds, with their complete and sensible " field- 
houses," may be seen anywhere else in the world. 

It seems to have been assumed in the East that 
any sort of a public building in a park must be 
ornate and useless — a combination of a band-stand, 
used one evening a week, with a pavilion, used by 
nobody at all, if he can help it. Probably the money 
spent on such structures in the New York play- 
grounds would have built field-houses like those in 



82 The Different West 

Chicago — permanent contributions to the health 
and enjoyment of the neighborhood; agencies for 
physical and moral improvement that can scarcely 
be overestimated. Each of these field-houses con- 
tains a large assembly-hall, whose use is given freely 
for private social gatherings; a gymnasium for men 
and one for women, with skilled attendants; a 
branch of the public library, and a capacious out- 
door swimming pool. The buildings have the 
beauty that comes from perfect adaptation to use 
with no attempt at useless ornament. If the West 
had produced no educational innovation but these 
field-houses, it would have deserved our admiration. 
Public education has been carried higher up in the 
West than in the East. Universities supported by 
public taxation are the rule there instead of the 
exception. Great private foundations there are, 
but except in the case of the University of Chicago 
they are not relatively as Important as those of the 
East. And most of these endowed institutions are 
situated In cities of considerable size and draw their 
students largely from the adjoining population, to 
whom the privilege of living at home, with Its conse- 
quent saving, appeals more than the saving of 
tuition effected by enrollment In the state university. 
The difference between a state-supported university 
and institutions like Yale, Harvard, or Princeton 
may be summarized by saying that they are similar 



Democracy 83 

to the differences between a public high school and 
preparatory schools like Andover, Exeter, St. Paul's, 
and Groton. They depend largely on the fact that 
the student at Yale or Harvard, like the boy at St. 
Paul's or Groton, regards himself as the privileged 
member of an organization having forms, customs, 
and traditions, and not simply as benefiting by cer- 
tain courses of instruction provided equally for all 
by public taxation. 

It may be objected that this is not democratic; 
doubtless it is not. It is a popular fiction that 
democracy is particularly in favor in the United 
States. Democrats we are, doubtless, not from 
abstract love of it or reasoned acceptance of it, 
but, perforce, from the growth of conditions. Pro- 
fessor William G. Sumner used to say that the 
peerage was not introduced into this country when 
it was settled because economic conditions required 
that everyone should do personal work on the land; 
and a peer at the plough would be absurd. It is 
for reasons such as this that we have democratic 
manners and customs. There is plenty of democ- 
racy left at the older universities, and it is probable 
that the public institutions will become assimilated 
to them by the gradual acquisition of their own 
forms and traditions rather than by the loss of such 
by the institutions that now possess them. Indeed, 
the acquisition of ritual and ceremony has been 



84 The Different West 

rather noticeable in the United States all along the 
line in the past twenty years. 

At a Yale commencement a score of years ago 
the only traces of formalism were the procession 
across the Green to the old Center Church, headed 
by the sheriff of New Haven County, and the presi- 
dent's use of Latin as he bestowed degrees or called 
upon the band to play. Now the graduating classes 
are in cap and gown, and the dignitaries on the 
stage glow in the rainbow hues of appropriate robes 
and hoods. The president enters the university hall 
where the ceremonies take place, preceded by an 
official bearing a mace of gold, and he wears a 
heavy gold chain of office about his neck. Doubt- 
less the fact that the university already had certain 
forms and ceremonies made it easier to adopt these 
newer symbols and functions, and the briefness of a 
college generation — only four years — soon incor- 
porated them all into the local undergraduate body 
of tradition. 

This ritualizing influence, which has been felt 
widely outside of educational institutions, clothing 
railroad conductors in uniforms and bedecking erst- 
while sober churches with altar candles, will in time 
extend to our public schools and our state universi- 
ties. Even now there are signs of traditions in both. 
Public School No. 36, for example. Is affectionately 
spoken of by Its graduates as " Dear Old Thirty- 



Growth of Ritualism 85 



six." Tales of its early days accumulate and grow; 
its pupils are proud of its achievements in athletics 
or in scholarship, even as an Eton boy might be. 
It is slowly coming to have the same kind of tradi- 
tions as Andover or Lawrencevllle, albeit hampered 
by democracy. And this will come to the state 
universities also, perhaps with some grateful 
modifications. 

A recent investigator of university conditions, in 
illustrating the reign of blind tradition at eastern 
universities, has told how, when he asked for the 
reason of this or that oddity, he was answered 
calmly, " We have always done it that way." That, 
of course, may or may not be absurd, according to 
circumstances. If an institution has always carried 
out some trivial ceremonial or custom of courtesy 
in a particular way, its continuance seems rather a 
fine thing; but if a vital function of the institution is 
performed in a wasteful or blundering manner, 
simply because no one has had sufiicient intelligence 
to do it otherwise — that is a totally different thing. 
From this kind of tradition the state universities are 
happily free: there is nothing to prevent altering 
their machinery in any way that will tend toward 
greater efficiency. 

This is why the easterner finds subjects in a 
western state university curriculum that tend to 
make him gasp. A "professor of poultry," such 



'^ 



86 The Different West 

as Wisconsin has, would stir Yale or Princeton to 
indignation or ridicule; not because facts about 
poultry are not worth knowing, or are not easily 
and satisfactorily taught by an expert, but because 
such a chair would not be in accordance with the 
"traditions" of the institutions. Wisconsin, or 
Kansas or Nebraska, is not bothered with traditions 
of that sort. Traditions of the trivial and harm- 
less sort, however, they are rapidly picking up. 
Take the "college yell," for instance. The average 
student Imagines, I suppose, not only that college 
yells have existed since the dawn of time, but that 
his particular college has practised and cherished its 
particular yell from the remotest antiquity. Now, 
most of us remember when colleges had no "yells." 
The "three times three" of Harvard, afterward 
adopted also by Yale, was hardly a distinctive 
university cry, nor was it intended as such. Most 
of the earlier "fancy" yells arose as jests. The 
famous excerpt from the Frog Chorus of Aris- 
tophanes, now used by Yale, notably had its origin 
in this way. Now they are all traditional, and the 
western universities have their traditions with the 
rest. 

A notable Instance of a more fundamental dif- 
ference between eastern and western colleges is 
the fact that practically all of the latter, and 
none of the former, are co-educational. The de- 



Coeducation 87 



mand that woman should share man's privilege 
of a university education was heard and answered 
both in the West and in the East, but the western 
answer was to admit women to the higher institu- 
tions of learning on the same footing with men, 
while the eastern answer was to create separate 
colleges for them, either quite apart, as at Vassar, 
Wellesley, and Smith, or in affiliation with the older 
universities, as at Radcliffe and Barnard. 

This difference in response may be due m part 
to the fact that economic reasons forbade the crea- 
tion in the West of separate institutions when the 
working machinery already existed in others. Still 
more, however, was it due to the basic fact that in 
the East, tradition is king, and co-education in the 
higher learning was there contrary to tradition. 

Once more; examine the relations between mem- 
bers of a university faculty and between these and 
the students, in the East as compared with the West. 
I have sat in a faculty group in a western state 
university, in the rooms of one of their number. 
All were merrily jesting and drinking beer, and 
with them sat the honored president of the univer- 
sity, similarly employed. Many holders of western 
chairs, if perchance their eyes fall on this page, will 
ask, with open eyes, "Well! why not?" There 
is absolutely no reason "why not;" but if you go to 
Cambridge, or New Haven, or Princeton to see a 



88 The Different West 

similar gathering, you will wait until the infernal 
regions are sheathed with a very heavy coating of ice. 

I may be wrong: my own acquaintance with 
eastern faculties is twenty years old. Perhaps they 
have learned some western customs; I know that 
they have benefited by an influx of western blood. 
That in itself was almost unheard of twenty years 
ago; perhaps some other things have also been 
added unto them. 

Still, however this may be, there is formalism 
rather than comradeship in the attitude of members 
of an eastern university faculty toward one another, 
and especially doth the president stand or sit aloof. 
And it is much the same as between professor and 
student. They are much nearer in the West than 
in the East, and it is better for both. There is 
more love and not less respect. 

Another distinction between eastern and western 
universities is that the latter are more local, the 
former more continental. This is natural, since 
there was a time when the eastern institutions were 
the only recourse of those who desired a college 
education. The habit thus formed, and the tendency 
of the father to send the son to his own college, 
account for the fact that an Illinois Yale man will 
often send his sons to Yale instead of to the Uni- 
versity of Illinois, and that a Harvard man in 
Topeka will patronize Harvard rather than the 



Western Universities Local 89 

University of Kansas. There is not the same reason 
for sending an eastern boy to a western university, 
founded for purely local state reasons, and it is 
seldom done ; although as these institutions gain 
prestige and their alumni become more widely scat- 
tered, the same causes may operate with them also. 
Furthermore, the alumni of the eastern colleges, 
and even the college authorities, carry on a more 
or less vigorous campaign in the Western States. 

Every large place has its association of Harvard, 
Yale; and Princeton alumni, and even of graduates 
of such smaller colleges as Amherst, Williams, or 
Dartmouth. The published accounts of meetings 
make public the existence and activities of these 
bodies, and the fact that men of standing in the 
community are graduates of these institutions. Some 
such bodies see to it that the advantages of their 
favorite colleges are presented to the senior classes 
of preparatory schools, both public and private, by 
illustrated talks given by graduates. There is no 
such propaganda on behalf of the western universi- 
ties. Proximity, a smaller cost of living, and the 
absence of tuition fees, militate In their favor; but 
the net result is hardly satisfactory, as the line of 
demarkation is drawn too much on the basis of the 
dollar. The well-to-do Princeton man in Indiana, 
we will say, sends his boy to Princeton as a matter 
of course; the one with a more moderate income 



90 The Different West 

would prefer to do so, but can afford only the nearer 
state university. Likewise, the boy who is attracted, 
perhaps, to Harvard by a glowing presentation of 
its charms, given before his high-school class, or 
by reading the Harvard papers supplied by gradu- 
ates to his school reading-room, or by the profuse 
Harvard athletic news printed In his local papers, 
goes only if he can afford it — otherwise not. 

This selective action is responsible for a good 
deal of the recent talk about plutocracy in eastern 
universities, for it is a natural fact that most of 
the western students there are wealthy. This state 
of things has worried the western alumni of eastern 
colleges more than a little, and they have tried of 
late to emphasize in their propaganda the fact that 
student self-support in eastern colleges has now be- 
come frequent and easy, and that there is no reason 
why an Industrious boy who wants to go to such a 
college should be deterred by financial reasons. In 
Chicago the Yale alumni support a scholarship, and 
the desirability of extending this practice has been 
discussed In St. Louis and other cities. However 
this may be, It seems certain that the eastern univer- 
sities will remain for some time more continental in 
their appeal than the western. 

Indeed, the state university as a hustling, growing 
institution is a thing of very recent date. Twenty- 
five years ago Michigan was the only one heard of 



University Growth 91 

or greatly regarded In the East. The others were 
poorly supported and had to struggle for recogni- 
tion and existence. This state of things has been 
changed: first, by the growing appreciation of higher 
education by the bulk of the western population, 
wisely and skilfully fostered by the broad policy of 
the universities themselves, which are cutting loose 
from the academic tradition and popularizing their 
courses by laying stress on practical agriculture, the 
breeding of domestic animals, and similar subjects; 
second, by recognition of the fact that a good plant 
and a good teaching force cost money, driven home 
by the phenomenal growth of such non-public insti- 
tutions as the University of Chicago, founded and 
supported by wealthy patrons; and, lastly, by the 
dawning consciousness in the mind of the rural legis- 
lator that a university president must needs be of 
somewhat larger caliber than the principal of a 
country school. The state universities as now con- 
ducted on broad lines, with ample state appropria- 
tions, by capable administrators, have a great future 
before them and are coming into their own with 
a rapidity that is hardly recognized in the East 
and that is astonishing to westerners with eastern 
affiliations. 

Any account of education in the West, however 
brief and sketchy, would not be complete without 
mention of the part played by this region in great 



92 The Different West 

extra-scholastic educational movements such as the 
formation and affiliation of women's clubs and the 
growth and extension of public libraries. Both are 
due to a recognition of the fact that education does 
not cease with school and college life, and that it is 
part of our legitimate business to see that it proceeds 
on proper lines, both In our own cases and in those 
of our companions and fellow citizens. In the case 
of the woman's club these efforts are purely those 
of private cooperation; with the library they have 
proceeded on a public and civic basis. Both clubs 
and libraries have increased throughout the country, 
but the part played by the West in their multiplica- 
tion, and the hearty recognition given to them there 
as civic agencies, are noteworthy. 

In the West the woman's club is a force that must 
be reckoned with. Even those of the male sex who 
regard these organizations with amusement and 
smile at the courageous way in which they attack and 
discuss the deep questions of philosophy, science, 
and political economy, acknowledge that at last the 
women have an organization that must be respected 
and taken into account. These organizations have 
club-houses that compare favorably with those of 
the men's clubs; they take an active interest in public 
and civic questions that puts most of the masculine 
organizations to shame. The man who said that 
he took a great interest in women because his mother 



Women's Clubs 93 



was one, was making more than a jest. As the 
mother is, the son is; and who can estimate the 
influence on our coming generation of a motherhood 
genuinely interested in good hterature, in moral up- 
lift, in civic righteousness? 

Step by step with the rise of the woman's club 
in the West has gone that of the public library. 
Women's clubs have been responsible in hundreds 
of cases not only for the inception of the library 
but also for the impulse that has caused the com- 
munity to undertake its support. In states having 
no adequate library law, women's clubs have worked 
for such a law and secured its passage. On the 
other hand, the library has worked for and with 
the woman's club in furthering and carrying on its 
educational program. The sympathy between the 
two depends not only on their similar aims, but also 
on the fact that libraries are so largely operated by 
women assistants. In many cases the responsible 
heads of libraries have been women who are also 
influential in club life. All this has favored 
cooperation. 

The so-called library movement of the past twenty 
years has been largely an extension of the library's 
scope, accompanied by entrance of more progres- 
sive and capable workers into the library field and a 
consequent wider recognition of the library's worth 
to the community, expressed especially In increased 



94 The D liferent West 

financial support from the public and also in large 
donations from private sources. 

In this extension, western libraries have done pio- 
neer work. Open access first attracted librarians' 
attention as practised on a large scale in the Cleve- 
land Public Library; work with children was done 
in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and other western 
libraries before it was recognized in the East; com- 
mission field-work, as now largely operated, orig' 
inated in western states. Cooperation with schools 
was carried on, on a large scale, in St. Louis when 
unheard of in the East. In fact, the atmosphere of 
free inquiry and experiment, characteristic of the 
West, has made itself felt in a peculiarly effective 
way, in this important educational work. 



CHAPTER VIII 

LITERATURE IN THE WEST 

"O OSTON and its vicinity used to have almost 
■"-^ a monopoly of American literature. The pub- 
lishing houses were there; the authors were chiefly 
there — or, if not, they had to go there to sue for 
recognition. The New York school — Halleck, 
Morris, Willis, and the rest — if we except Wash- 
ington Irving — cut but a sorry figure in the literary 
pantheon of those days. Poe — our greatest lit- 
erary genius — was embittered by the thought that 
he stood without the sacred pale. 

This monopoly, so far as It still exists, has passed 
to New York, largely for the same reason that 
Harvard used not to win football games — close- 
corporation in genius is never permanent. It may 
be that for a few years all the good writers in the 
country may live in Boston, but such a condition will 
pass — and it has passed. Boston does not welcome 
the outsider and so he stays outside and plays 
football, or writes books, in a more congenial 
atmosphere. 

This can not happen to New York because she 
has always made the outsider at home. In fact, 

95 



96 The Different West 

she has done this to such an extent that she has be- 
come a city of outsiders. They have swamped and 
hidden the "native New Yorkers" — a mythical 
genus. When one hears of a man who has come 
into prominence in New York, one asks instinctively, 
"Where did he come from?" and expects to hear 
that he was brought up in Maine, or Indiana, or 
Tennessee; the idea that he may have been born in 
New York never seems to occur to anybody. 

This, of course, is what makes New York "cos- 
mopolitan," but it is a little hard for the rest of the 
country. It is especially hard on the writers of the 
rest of the country, for, unless they go into journal- 
ism, New York is apt to spoil them. This it does 
by sybaritic influences, by flattery, in aM sorts of 
underground ways. Social favor is particularly In- 
sidious; it spoiled poor N. P. Willis, who might have 
amounted to something if he had stayed in Boston 
where he belonged. It has spoiled and is spoiling 
more good writers today than most people realize. 
I withhold names because I am afraid of libel suits; 
but discriminating readers will have no trouble in 
making out a list of promising writers from New 
England, the West, and the South who have made a 
splendid start, have gone to New York and then 
fizzled out completely. I mean from a literary 
standpoint, of course; some of them have made 
money hand over fist. 



Western Literary Groups 97 

O, the pity of it! Others have sensibly stayed at 
home and are doing conscientious work there. Good 
advice to the ambitious western literary worker who 
wants to go to New York would be that of Mr. 
Punch to persons about to marry, namely, " Don't! " 
Even Bryant would have been a greater poet if he 
had stayed in New England, although doubtless he 
would not have been so good a journalist. 

If all western writers had resisted this insidious 
influence there would today have been a western lit- 
erary school of considerable numbers and influence. 
Even as it is, the respectable number of those who 
have stayed at home is responsible for local groups 
that can not be overlooked. The so-called Indiana 
writers will occur to the reader at once. That there 
should be a " literary centre " in this state seems to 
be regarded by the eastern papers as a huge joke. 
It is hard to see why. It may well be that a num- 
ber of good writers are now living near Indianapo- 
lis just as a number once lived near Boston. This 
and other groups are discovering local literary ma- 
terial — that is a hopeful sign. William Allen 
White tells us of Kansas, Mrs. Watts of Columbus, 
Ohio, Winston Churchill of St. Louis, and so on. 
Frank Norris was surely wrong when he asserted 
that the only places in the United States about which 
a story may be told are New York, Chicago, and 
San Francisco. " Imagine," he says, scornfully, 



98 The Different West 

"writing a story about Nashville, Tenn., or Buffalo, 
N. Y. ! " O. Henry, quoting this exclamation, takes 
up the challenge and proceeds to write about Nash- 
ville, Tenn., the best story he ever penned — a tale 
full of wit, human interest, character, excitement, 
and pathos — and withal so local that it could have 
been written about no other city than Nashville. 
At its close he remarks reflectively: "I wonder 
what's doing in Buffalo, N. Y.?" 

There is doubtless plenty doing in Buffalo; and 
when an O. Henry arises to tell us, we shall surely 
know of it. There are stories to tell — nay, there 
are histories and biographies to write; there is local 
botany, zoology and geology, sociology and archae- 
ology, in thousands of western towns, scattered 
through the valleys of the Mississippi and its tribu- 
taries; strewn over the apparently monotonous 
plains of Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, and Iowa. When 
we say that a place has no history, we mean simply 
that no one has yet arisen to appreciate it and 
write of it; when we say that such and such a his- 
tory is dull, we mean only that the writer was un- 
able, or did not think it worth his while, to make 
it interesting. 

Wherever a western author may live, however, he 
usually goes to New York to have his book pub- 
lished. That publishing, as now conducted. Is chiefly 
a commercial enterprise is strikingly illustrated by 



Western Publishers 99 

its concentration In the commercial metropolis. 
The casual reader Invited to name offhand a pub- 
lisher not located In New York would be apt to be 
puzzled. Boston and Philadelphia hold on to a 
few, nominally at least and as a matter of senti- 
ment. In the West there are some brave attempts, 
and they seem to be succeeding. The time may 
come when publishing is no longer purely business 
and when a good man can carry it on in Oskaloosa, 
Iowa, or Tuscumbia, Ala., as well as anywhere else. 
Already great New York firms are finding It con- 
venient to have at least the manufacturing part of 
the work done outside the city. And if one large 
firm can profitably move to rural Long Island, it is 
hard to say why someone else may not presently 
make a still longer "trek." Possibly this may de- 
pend somewhat on specialization; certain It is that 
most of the publishing firms who have secured what 
seems to be a permanent foothold In the West are 
specializing successfully. Chicago is almost the only 
western city where a large general publishing busi- 
ness is successfully carried on. Elsewhere in the 
West there is specialization In such subjects as his- 
tory, bibliography, and a certain type of fiction, not 
too high In grade but undeniably popular. 

Specialization, too, is the note sounded by the 
few magazines now issued in the West. Besides 
the Inevitable medical and pharmaceutical period- 



lOO The Different West 

icals we have such publications as the Technical 
World Magazine and Popular Mechanics of Chi- 
cago, although these, for the general reader, are 
distinctly specialized. About the only general maga- 
zine in the region, The World To-day of Chicago, 
was recently purchased by W. R. Hearst and 
removed to New York. There would appear to be 
a field in the West for the purely local magazine, 
which Is as yet almost untrod. There might be at 
least one of these In each state, devoted to the 
description and discussion of local industries, civic 
Improvement, rural conditions, state history and 
biography, power-development, and so on. The 
most of this kind of literature that has any value is 
now issued by railways as part of their campaign 
of publicity. This is done far more In the West 
than in the East, and some of It Is excellently 
done — deserving of a more permanent setting. 

There Is one kind of periodical, however, that 
deserves treatment by Itself — that is the newspaper. 
Some critics are apparently forgetting that it is a 
periodical, like all the rest. If a man writes an 
article of, say, 5000 words for a monthly, they 
regard It as worthy of note; If he does the same 
thing for a daily. It Is beneath contempt. Some 
libraries are seriously discussing whether they shall 
not drop the dailies from their periodical lists, giv- 
ing up, for Instance, the New York Evening Post, 



Western Newspapers lOl 

the Boston Transcript, and the Springfield Repub- 
lican, and clinging to the Broadway Magazine and 
Munsey. Yet the daily is closer to the people than 
any of them, and will be more valuable than any 
others to the historian of a century hence. Sensible 
libraries are keeping as many files as they dare and 
the student of comparative life and customs In differ- 
ent regions can do no better than to go to the daily 
papers first of all. If there are differences worth 
discussing between East and West, some of the most 
Important may surely be expected to crop out In 
these same papers. 

The usual criticism of modern American news- 
papers Is that they are controlled by " the interests." 
So stated. It would appear not to be a legitimate 
complaint. A journal must be controlled by some 
man or by some body of men, commercial, political, 
or scientific. It Is hard to see why ownership by 
the Meat Trust or the Standard Oil Company 
should be more objectionable than ownership by 
John Smith, the Christian Science Church, the Pro- 
hibition Party, or the National Academy of Science. 
The trouble Is that In former days the owner's name 
was always known and his control was open, 
whereas nowadays, except In the case of religious 
papers. It Is generally kept quiet and the control Is 
secret. Where there Is ostensible control It Is gen- 
erally not the real one. 



102 The Different West 

A paper purporting to be the organ of the Repub- 
lican or Democratic Party is really, perhaps, the 
mouthpiece of the Cordage Trust; the sheet which 
announces on its title-page its adherence to high pro- 
tection may be only the personal tool of Thomas 
Jones; and the journal that is supposed to be owned 
and edited by John Smith does not betray the fact 
that this gentleman himself is owned and controlled 
by the Steel Trust. So it is not ownership of its 
papers by the Interests that the public has to object 
to; it is the fact that the ownership is concealed or 
misrepresented. And an additional grievance is 
that the concealment and misrepresentation them- 
selves are unknown to many and denied by others. 
We do not know who is responsible for what we 
read or from what standpoint it is written. Doubt- 
less the failure to label journals plainly "The Prop- 
erty of the Umbrella Trust," "The Personal Organ 
of Pierpont Rockefeller," and so on, is due to the 
popular prejudice against large corporations and 
those identified with them. The influence of the 
paper will be greater, it is thought, if the source 
and nature of that influence is concealed. This is 
just but not far sighted. Its result, so far, has been 
to discredit American journalism very largely among 
thinking people. It is leading to an interesting 
revival of personal journalism, not in the form of 
the daily paper but of the weekly, of the type exem- 



Personal Journalism 103 

pllfied and perhaps originated by Labouchere's 
Truth in London — written largely by one person, 
irresponsible, trenchant, sometimes a little scandal- 
ous, yet wielding great influence simply because its 
readers believe it to be fearless and independent. 
Its adherents prefer to read the real opinions of a 
man with whom they only partially agree, rather 
than sentiments written to order by an employee of 
some corporation. 

This new personal journalism, as might be ex- 
pected, flourishes particularly in the West. I do not 
know of any prominent example in the great eastern 
cities, but In the West we have The Public, of 
Chicago, edited by Louis F. Post; The Mirror, of 
St. Louis, by WiUiam Marion Reedy; The Bellman, 
of Minneapolis; Bryan's Commoner, La Follette's 
Weekly, and many others. These papers are all 
readable and worth reading. The ordinary daily 
journalism of the West is much like that of the East, 
but rather more local. We have, however, nowhere 
in the country a daily that sees the real continental 
values — probably because we have not yet a public 
that sees them. This is what despairing publicists 
mean when they say that the United States is not a 
*' nation." We have not got away yet from the 
attitude of the Revolutionary War, when the colo- 
nies were practically a loose group of allied foreign 
countries, when the Baltimore dandies in the Mary- 



I04 The Different West 

land regiments sneered at the Vermont backwoods- 
men, and the Massachusetts farmers were jealous 
of the Pennsylvania militia, and everybody went 
home when he pleased and obeyed orders when he 
was "good and ready." We should have been 
fighting for our liberties yet, in the intervals of get- 
ting in our crops and of attending to local politics, 
if the French had not lent us a hand. 

If we were even now a homogeneous nation, with 
country-wide national pride and no local misunder- 
standings and jealousies, this present volume would 
be as useless as the far-famed chapter on snakes in 
Iceland. Our country-wide newspapers, or our 
attempts to approximate them, are all in the East. 
If a foreigner wants to get daily American news as 
opposed to that of Minnesota or Illinois or 
Nebraska, he takes one of the New York dallies, or 
the Boston Transcript, or the Springfield Repub- 
lican. 

Mr. Bryce tells the story of a small western town 
with four daily papers. On being asked how such 
a place could keep up four papers, a citizen aptly 
replied that it took the four papers to keep up the 
place. The questioner, you see, had confused cause 
and effect. This function of the public press — of 
advertising or booming the place where it is pub- 
lished, rests, like all advertising, on a perfectly good 
psychological basis; but it is sometimes forgotten 



City Pride and Rivalry 105 

that other principles of advertising apply here also. 
In the first place there must be something to adver- 
tise. All the money in the world, spent on pub- 
licity, would not sell salt as sugar. 

This sort of booming leads to and fosters busi- 
ness rivalry and such rivalry often ends in bitter 
feelings that are inexplicable to an easterner. Such 
feeling there used to be between Chicago and St. 
Louis before the former city grew so large that 
it was forgotten. Such there was until very recently 
between Tacoma and Seattle; such there is between 
the "Twin Cities" — St. Paul and Minneapolis. A 
Minneapohs man, being asked for his automobile to 
assist in entertaining some visiting delegation, 
replied that he would lend it on one condition — it 
must not enter the city limits of St. Paul. This, 
which seems to an eastern man almost incompre- 
hensibly childish, was perfectly serious. Without 
the kindly nagging of the local press, these jealousies 
would not so often arise or so long be perpetuated. 

Another adjunct of city pride, of which the west- 
ern press is fond, is the so-called " slogan" — a pithy 
sentence embodying in epigram the advantages and 
virtues of a place — for indiscriminate use in electric 
signs, on banners, programs, circulars, and else- 
where. Tacoma once adopted the line "Watch 
Tacoma Grow"; but when she didn't grow fast 
enough and was outstripped by her big neighbor 



lo6 The Different West 

Seattle, she changed it to "You'll Like Tacoma," 
which has more of the permanent element in its 
make-up. Chicago proudly but simply says " I 
Will." St Louis, after the throes of an extensive 
newspaper competition, awarded a $500 prize to 
the fortunate composer of the following sentiment: 
"Some cities have a slogan; St. Louis has the 
goods." All of which is taken seriously by many 
citizens and furnishes undoubted material for news- 
paper discussion in an off season. 

The local character of the western press has ad- 
vantages that it would be wrong to overlook. A 
paper that tries to keep up with the news of the 
whole country has to cut its local news pretty short. 
The result is that in New York, for instance, much 
of the purely local matter is taken care of by small 
papers of the rural-press type — weekly sheets look- 
ing out for the interests of Harlem, Washington 
Heights, old " Greenwich Village," Tremont, a 
dozen or more localities in such boroughs as Rich- 
mond or Queens. Compared with these, the chief 
daily papers of western towns of 10,000 to 15,000 
inhabitants are positively metropolitan. It is easy 
to get local items into any of them, but they will be 
read over a very small part of the city. To induce 
the New York papers to notice a local event or 
occurrence it must be of importance sufficient to 
make it rank as news outside of New York — other- 



Western Press Local 107 

wise the local sheets must take care of it. New 
Yorkers know little of what is going on In their 
city. The city editor of the New York Sun once 
asserted that sufficient good stuff was left out of 
that paper daily to make several other issues — and 
good ones, too. Presumably a large part of this 
was local. 

Now there is nothing like this in a western city. 
The papers there print great quantities of local 
news. Every institution is followed up for Items, 
the Public Library Is a daily assignment, like the 
police court. Local portraits are published with 
very slight excuse. The reader Is saturated with 
local atmosphere and when he finds that he Is get- 
ting a little out of touch with the world outside, he 
begins to read the papers of other cities. This Is 
probably done to a much greater extent In the West 
than elsewhere, simply for the reason just stated. 



CHAPTER IX 

SCIENCE IN THE WEST 

'T^HE WEST'S science Is predominantly prac- 
-^ tical. All science, to be sure, is practical, but 
we have not all found it out yet. The man who 
liked the Theory of Functions "because it never 
could possibly be put to any use " was misinformed. 
Every bit of new knowledge, and every further de- 
gree of systematization of knowledge already 
acquired, has some bearing, actual or potential, on 
our daily life. Civilization has been advanced 
chiefly by belief In this, or at any rate by magnifi- 
cent disregard of Its opposite. 

I do not mean to say that pure science Is neglected 
in the West — her universities furnish proof to the 
contrary. So do her occasional bodies like the St. 
Louis Academy of Sciences with an honorable record 
of many years and with frequent publication of the 
work of such men as Chauvenet in mathematics, of 
Trelease in botany, or of Nipher In physics. What 
I do mean to say is that the lack of popular appre- 
ciation of science for Itself alone, which is notice- 
able throughout the United States, Is particularly 
evident In the West. The attitude of the press In 

108 



Applied Science 109 

matters like these Is always an indication of the 
popular mind. A meeting of the British Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Science is reported In 
the London papers very completely, many of the 
addresses being given in full and the whole thing 
being treated seriously, as we treat, for instance, a 
national political convention. In the New York 
papers a meeting of the American Association would 
be lucky to get a column; in the western papers it 
would have only a few sticks, if it were mentioned 
at all. And mention of the proceedings is apt to be 
in a jocose vein. That a sane man should devote 
time and money to clearing up some obscure point 
in physical science or natural history, or still more 
that he should spend his life in the service of some 
science not clearly hitched to the star of palpable 
dollars and cents, seems to the average reporter, 
who represents the average citizen, as essentially 
ludicrous and childish. 

When the New York Sun runs short of the efforts 
of amateur poets or the odd names of obscure citi- 
zens, for exploitation in humorous editorials. It can 
always make a hit by turning over to its " funny 
man " the latest entomological bulletin from Wash- 
ington, whose Latin technical names Introduced 
freely and commented upon in the Sun's well-known 
vein of good-humored satire, are in the estimation 
of its readers screamingly funny. 



no The Different West 

Hardly a paper in the country includes on its 
staff a scientific expert — a person through vv'hose 
hands material Involving scientific fact or comment 
must pass before it is approved for publication. The 
Boston Transcript is almost our only paper whose 
scientific news is looked upon by scientific men 
otherwise than with contempt. 

What has been said applies, it must be noted, to 
pure science. As soon as it passes the border line 
of application to some industry, it is differently re- 
garded. And scientific men are themselves partly 
to blame for this state of things, in fostering the 
idea that the best science is science that can not be 
applied. The best science is doubtless science that 
does not look for application. But it all can be 
applied and may one day be applied; and the citizen 
whose only respect is for the application will doubt- 
less come to respect the science too when he realizes 
the potentiality of it all. 

Certain problems of applied science the West has 
worked out or is working out for itself satisfac- 
torily. Chief among these, perhaps, is that of 
water-supply where the only source is the muddy 
rivers of the region. In St. Louis, for instance, 
before the World's Fair, the city water, drawn from 
the Mississippi, was so filled with sediment that its 
normal color was yellow or brown. Deposition of 
suspended matter took place in an ordinary tumbler 



Water Problems iil 

when it stood for any length of time. Water for 
laundry purposes was drawn a week in advance and 
allowed to settle in barrels before it could be used. 
A commission of experts reported to the city that 
it was impracticable to use the water of the Mis- 
sissippi at all and recommended a plan to bring a 
supply from a great distance at an estimated cost 
of $31,000,000. 

At this juncture it was decided to try another 
scheme, whose practical details were worked out by 
a young St. Louis chemist, Mr. John Wixford, a 
graduate of the city schools and of Washington Uni- 
versity. This plan was to get rid of the sediment 
by forming in the water by chemical action a coagu- 
lable precipitate that would stick to it and carry 
it down quickly. This proved entirely practicable, 
and St. Louis has since enjoyed water of crystal 
clearness, free not only from mud but from bac- 
teria, which are also taken care of in the general 
clearing-up process. 

The scheme cost just $10,000 to install and is 
operated at a very small yearly expense. The chem- 
icals used are cheap and easily obtained — merely 
lime and copperas, or, chemically speaking, calcium 
hydrate and sulphate of iron. Introduced into the 
muddy water these at once react to form sulphate of 
lime and ferrous hydrate. There are further and 
more complicated reactions into which we can not 



112 The Different West 

enter here, but in general the lime compounds are 
dissolved and serve merely to "harden" the water 
to a slight degree, while the iron compounds stick 
together in flocculent masses and sink, with the par- 
ticles of sediment and the bacteria. Anything that 
may be left is removed by rapid sand filtration. A 
somewhat similar method had previously been used 
also in Quincy, 111., and at other river towns, but 
its adoption on such a large scale was first effected 
in St. Louis. Thus a purely western problem has 
been solved by westerners in a characteristically 
western way, simple, effective, and thorough. 

Another problem, also connected with the rivers, 
is that of water transportation, already adverted to 
in a previous chapter. The use of the great west- 
ern rivers for freight and passenger trafiic has now 
almost ceased, railway transportation having taken 
its place. As is well known, an earnest effort is 
being made to revive it, and one feature of that 
effort is an attempt to commit the national govern- 
ment to an extensive scheme of river improvement. 
Experts appear to differ regarding the practicability 
of the various plans proposed. Meanwhile oppo- 
nents of the scheme are pointing out that the rivers 
are the same as they were fifty years ago, and are 
asking why they are not utilized again in their pres- 
ent condition before any attempt is made to render 
them still more usable. This is a good deal like 



Western Waterways 1 13 

objecting to the substitution of electric light for gas 
on the ground that a revival of candles Is among 
the possibilities. The old use of the rivers per- 
sisted while It was the only possibility and despite 
great Inconveniences and disadvantages. When a 
better means of transportation was devised, the 
rivers were disused. Now a scientific study of the 
problem shows that there Is a still better plan — a 
partition of the traffic between the railways and the 
improved rivers. The adoption of this plan may 
be slow, but despite foolish opposition on the part 
of the railroads, It Is bound to come. It Involves, 
of course, other improvements besides that of the 
channels, notably in the construction of boats, and 
the handling of passengers and freight. An attempt 
has been made to carry some of these out experi- 
mentally even with the rivers In their present condi- 
tion, and the results are likely to be Interesting. 
They should not, however, delay the progress of the 
improved waterway scheme as a whole, and doubt- 
less we shall see this other peculiarly western prob- 
lem solved also by westerners In a western way. 
An old Mississippi pilot, after an anxious and 
tiring night of steering around sandbars and dodg- 
ing wreckage, turned to a companion In the pilot- 
house and remarked wearily, " If I had the man- 
agement of the Universe I should make this river 
perfectly straight, with a full moon at each end." 



114 The Different West 

It is hardly probable that any such extensive im- 
provement as this will take place, but we may reason- 
ably expect that the river will be kept at a uniform 
minimum depth and that the banks will be prevented 
from caving in and filling it up. 

It is interesting to see how these technical prob- 
lems affecting the West cluster about the great 
rivers. A third in our list is the use of these rivers 
for waterpower. They are usually of great volume 
but small fall. The Mississippi, for instance, has 
been utilized to any great extent only at the falls 
of St. Anthony, at Minneapolis. Now, however, a 
great dam, to develop some 200,000 horsepower, 
is under construction opposite Keokuk, Iowa, at 
the rapids whose great energy has hitherto been 
allowed to go absolutely to waste. Of this great 
power, 60,000 horsepower has already been con- 
tracted for in St. Louis alone. Doubtless we shall 
see in the future a hydro-electric plant at every rapid 
along the course of the western rivers. Navigation 
will not be impeded, but actually improved, since 
canals are even now generally necessary to avoid 
these rapids and the water backed up by the dams 
deepens long reaches of the river above. 

There will be no interference with scenery, and 
objections such as have been properly made to 
hydro-electric development at Niagara and other 
great falls, will not apply. 



Supplementary Irrigation 115 

Another way in which applied science has come 
very near to the western people is in agriculture. 
Probably nowhere in the world has the farmer such 
a respect for scientific methods — properly so, for 
they have made his fortune for him. He readily 
votes taxes for the support of great agricultural 
schools and experiment stations and he studies their 
results with interest to see how they may be applied 
on his own land. As for machinery, he uses it every- 
where; In fact, his huge farms could not be oper- 
ated without it. His operating force of men is re- 
duced to a minimum. He has under cultivation 
square miles of land with no human habitation in 
sight. Yet he is not lonely, for he has the telephone 
to communicate with his neighbor and the automo- 
bile to reach him quickly in the flesh. 

One more great scientific improvement we may 
look for on the farm — the introduction of supple- 
mentary irrigation. It is a curious fact that this 
method has chiefly been used hitherto in desert 
places. The owner of a Connecticut farm who has 
spent much time beyond the Rockies tells me that 
there is scarcely a bit of land in the United States 
that would not be improved by it. In New England, 
for instance, it would make possible two crops in a 
summer instead of one, and it would forever re- 
move all fear of drought. A single rainstorm that 
occurred the other day in Arkansas was worth to 



ii6 The Different West 

that state, so the newspapers say, several millions 
of dollars. If this is so, why not invest a little 
money in a plant to protect the farmer permanently 
against drought? In fertile Kansas and Nebraska 
It may ruin all the crops of the year, whereas we 
hear of nothing of the kind In the California orange 
country, although that was originally a desert. 
Where there Is no rain, science provides the equiva- 
lent; where the rain fails only occasionally, we 
philosophically take the chances of disaster. We 
may look, I think, to a future where the farmer 
will insist on being made Independent of the clouds 
in Kansas as well as in California — in Oklahoma 
as well as in Oregon, 

Droughts are really the only blot on western agri- 
culture; In spite of them Kansas and Nebraska 
farming lands are held at fabulous prices; with 
supplementary Irrigation they may be expected to 
rise even higher. 

One of the unsolved problems of applied science 
in most of the Middle-West cities Is that of the 
abundant soft-coal smoke. Those who have studied 
the subject assure us that soft coal may be burned 
without excessive smoke, but In practice not only are 
special devices — patent grates or mechanical 
stokers — almost necessary for such burning, but 
even with their aid, black smoke will still appear 
at the time of stoking, without skilled management. 



The Smoke Nuisance 117 

The substitution of hard for soft coal is not only 
unlikely but undesirable. Hard coal is expensive 
in the Middle West on account of distance from 
the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania; and soft coal 
Is abundant and near. It is the cheapest and most 
convenient fuel-supply known to man — easily 
handled and quickly lighted — Its smoke is the one 
objection to it. Smoke-abatement means, therefore, 
the installation of proper smoke-consuming devices 
in connection with all large furnaces, with the train- 
ing of those who are to superintend and handle 
them; and the general education of the public In 
the smokeless management of domestic furnaces, 
stoves, and grates, without such devices. The use 
of fuel-gas is also an important factor where this 
is available. Natural gas, however, though a per- 
fect solution of the problem, is apt to be only a 
temporary one, as shown by the experience of Pitts- 
burg; and manufactured fuel-gas, though more and 
more widely used for cooking, is still too expensive 
for general heating purposes. The development of 
hydro-electric power, as at the great Mississippi dam 
at Keokuk, Iowa, now building, may also offer a 
partial solution. 

But at present the problem Is one of psychology. 
The things to be done are clearly Indicated; it is not 
so easy to get people to do them. The first thing 
that the enthusiastic reformer thinks of Is coercive 



ii8 The Different West 

legislation. It can not be said that this has proved 
successful when unaided. When a man is required 
by law to do what he believes to be impossible, he 
simply disobeys, and if he is punished, that only 
arouses his undying hostility to the law. Where 
smoke has been sensibly abated it has generally been 
done by dealing with each case as it arises, demon- 
strating to the offender that his plant would be 
smokeless if properly run, or could be made so by 
the expenditure of a specified sum in a specified 
way. Offenders on a large scale can be turned into 
law-abiding citizens in this way; those on a small 
scale must be dealt with by public opinion. 

It must not be forgotten that a large body of 
citizens in every smoky town is accustomed to the 
smoke and does not mind It; and believes that its 
abatement is an impossibility, or that, if possible, 
it would drive away profitable industries. A manu- 
facturer in a western city, whose son, home for his 
vacation from an eastern college, objected to the 
smoky atmosphere, informed the boy that the smoke 
was profitable and healthful, that he would have to 
get used to it and like it and that If he found it 
impossible to do so, he would have to go back to 
the East. 

No collection of notes on the West's problems in 
applied science would be complete without a word 
on the differences between the railroads of the East 



Railway Competition .119 

and the West. Some of these have already been 
briefly noticed. Possibly the most salient point of 
difference is that in the East the roadbed excels 
and in the West the equipment. In the East the 
permanent way is commonly solid and expensive, 
with double or even quadruple track on main lines, 
whereas in the West most of the lines are single 
and the roadbed poorly kept up, even on important 
systems. On the other hand, the general average 
of cars, especially of passenger day coaches, is 
poorer in the East than in the West, doubtless on 
account of the greater amount of short distance 
travel. The western cars are apt to be heavier 
and better lighted, the newer types of steel cars 
being met even on many second-grade systems. 

In the East a given territory is served by fewer 
lines than in the West, and the result is often that 
the service is more satisfactory. There is for in- 
stance only one company operating trains between 
New York and Boston, whereas there are four 
between Chicago and St. Louis, on no one of which 
is the service as good as on the eastern line. This 
is in spite of the militant competition due to the 
existence of an unnecessary number of lines and may 
be attributed to the fact that business which would 
yield a good profit to a single line will barely pay 
the expenses of half a dozen or so. "Touting" for 
business is much more active in the West than in 



I20 The D liferent West 

the East, and a man who Is planning a thousand- 
mile trip may expect calls from the representatives 
of half a dozen roads, who will set forth their 
advantages and solicit custom. Despite the greater 
profit of freight business every possible effort is 
made to stimulate passenger traffic. The literature 
issued is elaborate and well conceived. In 19 ii the 
St. Louis Public Library collected 400 volumes of 
such literature, of which only a few were issued by 
eastern roads, where the ordinary travel is usually 
as heavy as can well be accommodated, especially in 
summer. 

All this competition Is due partly to the facts that 
consolidation of roads has been more thorough in 
the East, and that the building of unnecessary com- 
peting lines was made difficult there when it was 
easy in the West; and also in large part to the 
great ease of running lines over the flat prairie, 
where, in the early days of railroading, there was 
scarcely any grading at all, and the rails were often 
moved about from one part of the prairie to 
another, with little effort. 

Railway competition In the West, however, is 
solely for passengers and freight; it has no effect 
on rates or speeds, which are now regulated by 
agreement between the roads, much to the detriment 
of the public. State governments are taking a hand 
in rate-regulation, but they have not tackled the 



speed Conditions I2l 

speed question yet. Eastern express speeds vary 
from forty to sixty miles per hour; in the West, 
even where the quahty of the roadbed does not limit 
speed, it is kept down by agreement. All trains 
between Chicago and St. Louis, for instance, a dis- 
tance of 280 miles, require eight hours, and this is 
quite typical. In the West any train that makes an 
average of over thirty miles an hour is a flyer. 
Conditions are improved by occasional " speed 
wars," but soon revert to their former state. This 
does not apply of course to the fast expresses on 
the lines between the Mississippi and the Atlantic 
Coast, which may make, on occasion, speeds as high 
as eighty miles an hour within the region of which 
we are now speaking. 

So far as western roadbeds are concerned, there 
is a notable trend now toward decided improvement, 
as in the double-tracking of the great main lines 
such as the Union Pacific, and the installation of 
automatic signals, as on the Missouri Pacific and 
the Frisco. 

The efforts of western roads to "make business" 
appear also in their attempts, often very success- 
ful, to build up industry along their lines. Their 
organizations include great land and industrial de- 
partments, and much of the literature already 
referred to is issued in connection with these. The 
eastern lines do little work of this kind, although the 



122 The Different West 

New Haven road has just established an industrial 
department — the first of its kind in the East. 

Another marked difference between eastern and 
western railroad travel is the fact that so much of 
the latter takes place at night. In the East there 
is considerable through travel by daylight, espe- 
cially in summer, when a large proportion of the 
passengers are women. In the West, daylight 
travel is mostly local; if a man plans a trip requiring 
8 to 12 hours he almost always goes at night. Pos- 
sibly one reason for this may be the monotony of 
the outlook. We Americans, who have such odd 
streaks of sentiment in our materialism, are very 
fond of fine scenery. When traveling we will often 
stop over for a night in order not to miss a day's 
ride through the mountains. Even east of the Mis- 
sissippi, trains will be selected and schedules 
scanned so that the traveler may pass the Alle- 
ghanies, or the Mohawk Valley, or some other 
choice bit of scenic territory by daylight. But across 
the plains or over the prairies, the spice of variety 
is absent. One hour and one mile are as good as 
the next, and the passenger might as well sleep away 
his time. 



CHAPTER X 

ART IN THE WEST 

THE measure of popular appreciation of art is 
doubtless not the existence of museums or pub- 
lic collections, or even the degree to which these are 
visited by citizens, but the good taste displayed in 
the construction and arrangement of the material 
things used or met with in daily life — buildings, 
streets and parks, domestic implements, ornaments, 
articles of clothing, and so on. Tested thus, modern 
appreciation of art is far below what it was in 
ancient Greece; the Germans today have less of it 
than the French, and the English still less. We 
have not so much of it in America as any European 
country has; and there is less of it in the West than 
in the East. The Anglo-Saxon race has never ex- 
celled in this appreciation of the beauty of common 
things and it is doubtful whether it will ever do 
so. 

In the West the old French sub-stratum, which 
might have favored it, has been pretty well snowed 
under. Age, which makes some things beautiful, 
independently of the maker's will, is acting to some 
extent in the West as It has done earlier in the East; 

123 



124 The Different West 

but unfortunately the West does not like relics. As 
a general thing only the old appreciate antiquities, 
and the West is still young enough to despise them. 
The Catholic Church, which is old enough to ven- 
erate things for their age alone, preserves its land- 
marks, but about every other relic in the average 
western town is destroyed ruthlessly when its imme- 
diate usefulness has passed. 

Ordinary utensils are mostly ugly all over the 
United States: the West can claim no distinction in 
this regard. There is not even any good domestic 
art indigenous to the soil, as there is west of the 
Rockies where the forms and decoration of pottery, 
buildings, textiles, etc., made and used by the In- 
dians, are so good. Indian utensils found over the 
Middle West are always interesting and sometimes 
artistic, but they are prehistoric and can have no 
effect on modern life as the art of the Navahos and 
the Hopis, for instance, incontestably has. 

In architecture the West is doing well, and in this 
respect there seems to be a genuine and growing 
appreciation of beauty and good taste applied to a 
utilitarian end. Recent residential sections in west- 
ern cities are apt to be beautiful, that Is, if we look 
at each residence separately. There is little " team 
work," but that may come later. The wealthy 
donor of a memorial chapel In a New York suburb 
stipulated that she should design and construct the 



Beaux- Arts and Bizarre 125 

building in her own way, afterward turning it over 
to the trustees of the church to which she was giving 
it. The memorial, while built as an annex to the 
church, proved to be in a totally different style and 
altogether incongruous with it. Asked the reason, 
the good lady replied: " I didn't want it to be like 
the church. I wanted it to be so different that people 
would ask as they passed, 'Why! w^hat is that?' 
and would be told: 'That is the Smith Memorial 
Chapel!'" By a similar wish — the desire to be 
conspicuously different — have most of our house- 
builders been actuated. Better far to live in south- 
ern California, where you have to build in the 
Mission style, whether you want to or not. 

A New York wit once remarked that there were 
in that city only two architectural styles, " the Beaux- 
Arts and the Bizarre." The West has been happily 
free from this bondage to a single school, however 
good; and odd and grotesque though some of her 
buildings may be, it is hardly possible to place in 
this class all that have not been designed by a single 
coterie of architects. It is said that Denver owes 
the attractiveness of its residence sections to the fact 
that a group of young Beaux-Arts men happened to 
be on the spot just at the time when the rising for- 
tunes and the inclinations of the successful miners 
acted together to produce a building boom. How- 
. ever this may be, the city boasts of many creditable 



126 The Different IF est 

private houses, and the Paris school is of course 
welcome to whatever part of the credit it deserves. 
Doubtless it deserves much throughout the West, 
but it is probably well that there are others to claim 
their share of praise. 

So far as what is generally called " art " is con- 
cerned — the formal production and exhibition of 
painting and sculpture — the West is doing her 
share. It is an interesting fact that New York has 
never been able to capture the leadership in art, in 
the United States, as she has that of commerce, 
finance, and literature. Her literary supremary won 
from Boston not long ago, she will not hold undis- 
puted. [That has been discussed in a previous chap- 
ter. But the supremacy in art she has never held. 
Great artists have not lived and painted there. The 
wonderful subjects to be found in her streets and on 
her waterways are just beginning to find recognition. 
She has had no preeminent art school. No one pro- 
fessional association has been able to hold all her 
artists. The National Academy is national only in 
name. There is no proper home for current art 
exhibitions in the great city. Philadelphia — de- 
spised Philadelphia — leads the metropolis in art 
matters, and dozens of other smaller cities stand 
abreast of her. New York's Metropolitan Museum 
stands unrivaled, but merely because the gifts of mil- 
lionaires have put it in funds. 



Museums and Clubs 127 

In the West, Chicago and St. Louis both have 
noteworthy art museums and popular appreciation 
of them is greater than in most eastern cities. Chi- 
cago has the best site for popular work; the St. 
Louis museum, which is the permanent part of the 
World's Fair art section, necessarily stands on the 
site of that fair, in Forest Park, inaccessible to 
the great mass of the public. It will have to be sup- 
plemented by exhibitions down town if the great 
bulk of the population is to be reached. But even 
with this handicap the interest shown in it is note- 
worthy. I think we may say that in the West, even 
more than in the East, people are well disposed 
toward art. Like the cautious French student whom 
Arago asked ironically if he had ever seen the 
Moon, they "have heard it spoken of." There is a 
disposition among all to welcome it and wish it 
well. But the tendency is to think of it as some- 
thing apart from daily life. It is an Anglo-Saxon 
tendency which is felt also by religion. We like to 
keep these things severely in their places — to be 
able to water the milk (or the stock) on week days 
and attend Divine Worship on Sundays; to look 
out of our ugly offices all day, at the ugly buildings 
across the ugly street and then go home to gaze 
at the Corots and Daubignys that our millions have 
enabled us to acquire. But although this feeling is 
stronger in the West than in the East, there are 



128 The Different West 

also more hopeful signs of a revolt against it in 
the former region. There is nothing in the East, 
so far as I know, quite like the Artists' Guild of 
St. Louis. The Authors' Club in New York resem- 
bles it but has for its basis purely literary work. 
The Salmagundi and similar organizations do not 
take its place. 

The " Arts and Crafts Movement " is strong in 
the West and has perhaps received somewhat more 
than the average amount of sympathy and appre- 
ciation from the ordinary citizen. 

To the production of good painting and sculp- 
ture the West is contributing notably, both by fur- 
nishing subjects and those who can interpret them. 
The effect of a great work of representative art — 
painting, sculpture, drama — depends on two 
things. A mathematician would say that it is " a 
function of two variables" — the thing represented 
and the state of mind of the artist. In the proper 
balance of these factors lies the success of the work. 
The painter who tries to paint as much like a pho- 
tograph as possible, shutting out the personal ele- 
ment altogether, fails; but so also does he who tries 
to express himself by a representation that succeeds 
only In obeying the Second Commandment literally 
In looking like nothing " In heaven above, or the 
earth beneath, or the waters under the earth." The 
expression of one's self Is the Important thing, to 



Western Subjects in Art 129 

be sure, provided one has something worth while 
to contribute, but the thing through whose repre- 
sentation that expression is to be accompHshed is 
not unimportant. I do not believe that a man can 
express as much in a picture of an apple on a plate 
as he can in a landscape, nor that he can express 
just the same things in a landscape that he can in 
a group of figures. And yet it is the manner rather 
than the matter that constitutes art. 

There is yet matter in the West, waiting for the 
western artist to express himself and to express the 
West — its largeness, its restlessness, its impatience 
of control. The eastern artist who "goes West" 
for his subject seldom stops short of the Rockies, 
or perhaps, like Remington, he goes on to the sage- 
brush and alkali of Wyoming or Arizona. The 
West in our present sense is yet to be painted in 
its largeness and freeness, and its own sons must 
do the work. Parts of it have been done, and done 
well. No one has painted the Mississippi River 
like Sylvester of St. Louis; the Chicago River has 
its interpreter in Clusman of that city; Meakin 
paints Ohio, and the "Hoosier group" — Stark, 
Adams, Forsyth, and Steele — the country about 
Indianapolis. But the West depicted in all its full- 
ness as the Dutch painters have given us Holland 
or as Sorolla has painted present day Spain, is, it 
seems to me, yet in the womb of Time. I do not 



130 The Different West 

know who is to depict it if not some painter or some 
school of painters from the West itself. And when 
it is done it will not be done in the French or the 
German or the Italian style, or in imitation of any- 
thing or anybody, but with originality. 

The depressing thing about most American art 
exhibitions is the obvious imitation. The French 
impressionists hit on a way to depict the delicate 
play of color on the surfaces of objects — a wonder- 
ful method though sacrificing somewhat the impres- 
sion of solidity and actuality of those objects. At 
once scores of painters try to do the same thing 
and succeed only in conveying the impression that 
trees, rocks, and buildings are themselves pink, yel- 
low or lilac instead of merely reflecting light of 
those colors. Another artist produces wonderful 
effects by slapping on pigment with a palette-knife, 
and a swarm of others immediately adopt the 
method, without producing the effects. So it goes; 
and the same is true, of course, in any other art, 
such as poetry or music. Originality is the only 
thing that counts, and it is the only thing that can- 
not be imitated. 

Now Americans, least of all those of the West, 
are by no means imitators in other fields. In me- 
chanics, for instance, we have long led the world in 
boldness and originality as well as in fertility of 
invention. There seems to be no reason why we 



Imitation in Art 13 1 

should not be bold, original, fertile, and successful 
in art also, as soon as our bold and original spirits 
see in art something that is worth their while. So 
long as art is something for ladies to putter at or 
for badly paid and incompetent workmen to bungle 
over, this realization will remain far distant. Curi- 
ously enough, the first dawn of a new day shines 
forth not in our painting but In our sculpture, and 
the sculpture and sculptors of the West, especially 
when dealing with western subjects, do her great 
credit. There is something virile about sculpture 
that holds the western imagination, and it may be 
that in this form of art the West Is to excel and so 
to find its true expression. 

"It takes two to tell the truth," says an old 
writer, "one to speak and the other to listen." 
Likewise does it take two to give a work of art its 
value — one to create and one to appreciate. The 
greatest art is that of the man who causes you to 
imagine that you see what he desires you to see. 
The shadow on the snow In yonder picture has 
little to do with the artist's brush-marks, as you may 
see If you step nearer and regard the picture close 
at hand. The shadow is In your brain, and is partly 
there because you know you ought to see It. Yet the 
suggestion Is the work of the artist — and that is his 
art. Such art there cannot be, however, without the 
party of the second part, the person suggestible to 



132 The Different West 

the artist's efforts. The condition of his mind re- 
acts on the artist; if the suggestion buds and blooms 
in his imagination, the artist is encouraged; if not, 
he is Hkely to take up the photographic style that 
suggests nothing to the imagination, and represents 
only a low type of art. 

Thus it is encouraging when one sees even fail- 
ures in an attempt at this kind of painting; its 
very existence shows the presence of appreciative 
spectators. 

Standing in a crowded western art museum I 
heard one man say to another, " How many of these 
people understand what they see?" If he meant 
to ask how many appreciate the technique of the 
artists at whose works they gaze, the answer must 
be, "Very few." But the understanding of 
technique Is not the appreciation of art. It is not 
at all necessary In order to receive the artist's 
message; It may, indeed, interfere with such recep- 
tion. The artist who paints or the poet or musician 
who writes, solely to Interest his fellow artists In 
the way in which he does it, is not an artist of uni- 
versal appeal, which means that he is not truly great. 
The great artist Is great among artists and also 
among those who know nothing of art, provided 
only their senses and their minds are in proper 
shape. When an art-gallery is thronged with per- 
sons who are evidently enjoying what they see, such 



Music in the West 133 

questions as I have quoted are superfluous. It takes 
little observation to pick out those who have the 
common sense that is necessary to look at a picture, 
as it is necessary to most acts in this world of ours. 
The man, for instance, who has not noticed that 
the best pictures are so painted that they must be 
seen from one particular distance, and that only — 
who regards a canvas from a viewpoint of six 
inches, and seeing only brush marks and unblended 
colors, concludes that he does not like art, may be 
seen in any miscellaneous gallery crowd. He does 
not yet form part of the intelligent public that the 
artist must reckon with; yet even he requires but 
a word to set him right. 

A love for good music is one of the things for 
which the West has to thank its German citizens. 
Why the Germans should be the leading musical 
people in the world is a hard problem to solve; they 
do not look it, whereas the Latin peoples decidedly 
do. But why, if music is a Teutonic gift, did not 
our own Teutonic forefathers transmit it to us? 
The English are probably the most unmusical nation 
on earth; what hope there is for us Americans we 
have largely from the leaven of other peoples that 
has been and is working on us. 

Music is like language: the only way to under- 
stand it is to listen to it. There is no use in trying 
to teach a babe to talk by giving him lessons in 



134 The Different West 

grammar and rhetoric. When he knows one lan- 
guage these will help him to acquire another, and 
likewise a listener that understands the musical lan- 
guage of Beethoven but not that of Debussy may be 
helped by verbal explanation. But just as the way 
to resume specie payments was to resume, so "the 
way to listen to music" is to listen and to listen 
much and attentively. The presence of other list- 
eners who evidently like what they hear is a potent 
factor in the increase of musical appreciation in a 
community, and here is where the Germans have 
done such good service. The West still suffers, it 
is true, from the prevailing American contempt of 
things done on a small scale. Unless a town is big 
enough to support a Boston symphony orchestra or 
a Metropolitan Opera, it may as well throw up the 
sponge, according to this view. Salvation from this 
belief is to be found in the multiplication of per- 
formers, as opposed to mere listeners. If there are 
in a town a large number of persons who sing or 
who play on some musical instrument, the existence 
of musical organizations will come as a matter of 
course. This is the way that it works In Germany, 
and when the German leaven has worked so far that 
it is also the case In small western cities, the West's 
musical life will have been put on a new foundation. 
As for western theatres, they are chiefly houses 
where traveling companies play for engagements of 



The Drama 135 



a single night to a week or two — sometimes longer. 
For the larger cities there are certain advantages in 
this, but the disadvantages outweigh them. The 
advantages are those common to all systems of peri- 
patetic interchange. The Methodist ministry has 
been operated on that basis for a long time and 
those concerned appear to be satisfied with it; but 
it has never commended itself to other Christian 
bodies. The churches and the clergy both get va- 
riety; there is no monopoly of what is good on 
either side; no one has time to get into a rut. On 
the other hand, there is no element of stability or 
permanence in such an arrangement. Everyone con- 
cerned is looking forward to the next move, and 
there is hardly time to become accustomed to one 
set of conditions before another takes its place. 

It may be said that the peripatetic theatrical sys- 
tem is not common to the West, or to small places, 
at all. The old-fashioned stock company, as we 
saw it at Wallack's or Daly's in New York, in the 
Boston Museum, or at Mrs. John Drew's in Phila- 
delphia, is practically obsolete. There are no " one- 
night stands" in New York, but the difference is 
one of quantity rather than of quality. Sooner or 
later every play and every actor goes " on the 
road" — even the Metropolitan Opera Company. 
This is true, and yet the same play may run at the 
same theatre in New York for a whole season. 



136 The Differ ent West 

Things have time to get settled as they never do In 
stays of a few nights each In small cities. One 
would rather see any favorite actor In New York 
than at a one-night stand. Why? Good acting 
Is a very sensitive plant: It responds quickly to con- 
ditions and environment and a " first night," popu- 
lar though It may be, Is never the best night at a 
playhouse. Obviously, then, In a tour made up 
chiefly of "first nights" no theatrical company can 
do Itself justice. 

Again, under present conditions there Is no East 
or West, no North or South in theatrical matters; 
the country Is one huge circuit, and no section has 
an opportunity to express Itself, despite sectional 
dramas like In Mizzotira, The Nigger, and the like. 
From this point of view the drama, as a representa- 
tive art, Is surely not In a satisfactory state, but the 
West now simply shares conditions common to all 
the United States. 

The state of the arts, one and all. In any com- 
munity depends somewhat on the way In which they 
are taught or fail to be taught, to the young. 

American educational institutions have just begun 
to awaken to their duties in the matter of art instruc- 
tion. Fifty years ago no one of them taught litera- 
ture with any Insistence on the fact that It Is an 
art; as for music, painting, and sculpture, they were 
treated with contempt. This is being slowly reme- 



Art Instruction 137 



died. In the West, musical instruction in the com- 
mon schools is being taken up, and taken up in the 
right way. Universities are introducing courses in 
music and art. When I was told the other day 
that a promising musician — a young man — had 
gone to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln to 
study counterpoint and composition my first feeling 
was one of surprise, not unmingled with amusement; 
my next was a thrill due to the realization that the 
musical West is coming into her own. 

No longer Is the artistic progress of the univer- 
sity student to be gauged by the childish lays of the 
average college glee club and the disheartening 
drawings In the average college paper. These 
things are looking up, and nowhere more than In 
the West. The Anglo-Saxon may never count art 
as his stronghold; but we may at least hope that he 
is at last saying good-by to the age of artistic igno- 
rance, childishness, and triviality in which he has so 
long complacently dwelt. 



CHAPTER XI 

SOCIETY IN THE WEST 

THE whole subject of social standing in the 
United States has been greatly neglected by 
writers and students. Making a list of countries in 
the order of fixity of social status and its relationship 
with beliefs, occupations, and other social phenom- 
ena, we should doubtless find India, with its caste 
system, at one extreme and the United States at the 
other. In India, given a man's caste, one may know 
at once not only his occupation, habits, religious 
belief, and general attitude of mind, but those of 
his ancestors and descendants. Passing through the 
list of countries where it is less and less possible 
to infer any such connection, we arrive finally at our 
own, where it is least possible. It would be wrong 
to conclude, however, that no conclusions of the kind 
may be drawn here. They follow more easily in 
the East than they do in the West. In no land prob- 
ably, for instance, is there a total divorce between 
social status and occupation. In many countries the 
latter depends strictly on the former. In the United 
States the dependence is rather the other way, but 
not wholly. We may infer that the day-laborer is 

138 



Social Standing 139 

not an intimate in the house of the bank-president; 
that is, we infer his social standing from his occupa- 
tion; but it is also true that the bank-president's 
son, however impoverished he might become, would 
rarely think of resorting to manual labor of this kind 
for support. In other words, we may infer occupa- 
tion from social standing to some degree even in 
this country. 

Perhaps this is the place to define what may be 
meant by a " social scale." It is a very easy matter, 
as it depends solely upon the possibility of intimate 
personal association. If you acknowledge that it is 
impossible that a given man should ever invite you 
to his house for dinner, and that you would feel 
greatly honored if he did so, you thereby acknowl- 
edge him as your social superior. If he invites you 
and you still feel flattered by the invitation, the 
difference between you is less, but he is still above 
you. If you exchange and accept invitations freely 
with no feelings of the sort, you are soci"al equals. 
If you hesitate about accepting his invitation, and 
think that you are conferring a favor if you do, you 
regard him as your social inferior; still more so if 
you would never think either of accepting his invi- 
tation or of inviting him yourself. 

But, you say, how about the other fellow? Is he 
willing to accept your and his relative positions in 
the social scale as you evaluate them? In a land 



140 The Different West 

where the social scale Is absolutely fixed, yes. In 
India there is not the sHghtest doubt on either side. 
In England there is not much. In America there Is 
a great deal. A may consider himself B's social 
superior, when In the estimation of B their positions 
are reversed. Still, if we take positions far enough 
apart on the scale, the difference is generally recog- 
nized on both sides; that Is, If we accept the cri- 
terion of dinner invitations. A and B may each look 
down socially on the other; neither would then think 
of Inviting the other, or of accepting his Invitation. 
If A and B, however, are really far enough apart, 
the unwillingness of A to Invite B Is generally accom- 
panied by great willingness of B to accept If Invited. 
So much for my test of social position, of which I 
make a present to any aspiring sociologist who 
wishes to experiment further with it. 

I leave to this gentleman, whoever he may be, the 
interesting task of drawing up a list of occupations 
in various lands In the order of their social value. 
The order would not be by any means the same in 
all countries, or In the same country at all times. 
Commercial occupations have risen In the social 
scale In England; the professions are still relatively 
lower there than in the United States. In a small 
American town, no one stands higher than the local 
lawyer, physician, and clergyman; In an English 
village of similar size there is always a landholder — 



Public Office and Society 141 

a squire — to overtop everyone else. Here, differ- 
ences between West and East are slight and almost 
vanishing; but it is probably true that in the West 
commerce stands relatively higher and the profes- 
sions lower than in the East. The tradition of 
clerical dominance, which still lingers in parts of 
New England, for instance, has never existed there. 
The lawyer is important politically but not neces- 
sarily socially. State or national office has not the 
standing that it has in the East. In many countries 
the possession of an office raises one at once in the 
social scale. There is something of this sort at 
Washington and at one or two state capitals, but 
not in the West. The word "un-American" has 
been overworked, but I believe it finds its place here. 
The bestowal of social standing on a person simply 
because he holds office is especially objectionable in 
this country, where offices are commonly elective. 
Were it generally acknowledged it would make un- 
available for office many men of force and ability 
who are not "clubbable" or whose wives are 
regarded as " impossible." 

To begin at the top, there is absolutely no social 
parallel between the President of the United States 
and a foreign monarch. The latter is the social 
head of his country; in England he is little else. 
To bestow any such position on the President is 
absurd, and although there has always been an effort 



142 The Different West 

to do so, its social writs have scarcely run beyond 
the boundaries of the District of Columbia. The 
newspaper custom of dubbing the President's wife 
the "first lady In the land" Is not only ridiculous, 
but harmful. A man once told me that he Intended 
to vote against the presidential candidate of his own 
party, one of the best equipped men who ever sat 
in the chair, because his wife was unfitted, for some 
reason or other, to be "first lady." 

Our offices, from the President's down, are busi- 
ness positions, and should be filled for merit, not for 
social standing. Only in the case of ambassadors to 
foreign countries should this have weight. In Rome 
we must do as the Romans do; but on the soil of 
the United States we are the "Romans" ourselves, 
and our customs should govern. 

As I have said, there Is little of this kind of thing 
in the West. There is also, less than In the East, 
the feeling that social superiority carries with it the. 
privilege of considering one's self superior in other 
respects. A very able machinist, we will say, has 
not those qualities that would make him a welcome 
guest at your table. That Is no reason why. In 
conversing with him about machinery — a subject 
in which he is your acknowledged superior — you 
should condescend to him. And yet you surely 
would, were you an Englishman, and you probably 
would if you were an easterner. You might, but 



Superior and Inferior 143 

you would not be so likely, if you were a westerner. 
A Scotchman, of good middle-class position, after 
a few days in this country, said to me : " I have 
never in my life seen so many people who are 
aggressively ' as good as you are.' " Now, the " ag- 
gressiveness," if it were really present, was objec- 
tionable; nobody ought to be unpleasantly aggres- 
sive, no matter what his social status. But probably 
it was merely the absence of formal British obse- 
quiousness that struck the good man, and struck him 
unfavorably, as everything strange does strike our 
transatlantic cousins. As for being " as good as he 
was" — bless his heart; so they were, in the places 
where they came into contact with him. They were 
all passengers on a trolley car or pedestrians on a 
sidewalk together. The fact that many of them 
were his social inferiors had no more to do with it 
than the fact, equally certain, that some of them 
were his social superiors. The idea that the social 
inferior should behave always as if inferior, whether 
in social contact or some other, is a relic of the days 
when before the law the social superior was treated 
differently from the inferior. That day has not 
entirely passed, but, in theory at least, all are now 
treated alike. In India, as Mr. Price Collier notes, 
it is only the British yoke that keeps them equal; to 
the native it is almost unthinkable that the prince 
and the beggar should be punished alike for murder. 



144 The Different West 

And to the Englishman it is still unthinkable that 
an ignorant noble should, without condescension, ac- 
knowledge inferiority in any respect to a " humble " 
though eminent scholar. In the western United 
States, perhaps, more than elsewhere, social matters 
are kept within their own sphere. A may be socially 
inferior to B, his equal as an athlete, and far supe- 
rior to him in business ability. He is treated in 
accordance with the particular contact that is taking 
place between the two. 

The relation between religious belief and social 
standing is another curious and fascinating subject 
of study for the investigator of differences between 
the East and the West. Such a connection exists 
everywhere and is usually recognized, though little 
is said about it. In parts of the country where there 
wa-s an established church, like the Congregational 
in Connecticut or the Episcopal in Virginia, that 
church has always kept more or less of the social 
prestige that once belonged to it. In states where 
there was no established church, colonization was 
sometimes promoted under particular religious aus- 
pices, as under the Catholics in Maryland or the 
Society of Friends in Pennsylvania — these have 
retained social eminence. The fact that the Epis- 
copal church was established by law in England 
gave it prestige in colonial times even in colonies 
where it was relatively weak. The Middle West 



Sects, East and West 145 

spent Its colonial days as a Spanish or French pos- 
session, but it was never colonized in the same sense 
as the states on the Atlantic seaboard, and the re- 
ligious connections of its masters have not been 
handed down in the same way. These connections 
were, of course, predominantly Catholic. The 
Mississippi Valley is rich In Catholic memories, but 
those memories are largely of the deeds and lives of 
missionaries who worked among Indian tribes now 
vanished. In New Orleans, however, and to a lesser 
degree In St. Louis, Catholics are strong socially; 
and In numerous smaller towns where the French 
tradition lingers, the same Is true. 

In general, the West Is distinguished from the 
East by lack of any one or of any few religious 
denominations to which social eminence attaches. 
Denominations that are powerful through numbers 
contain, of course, more socially powerful Individ- 
uals than others. The Presbyterians, Methodists, 
and Baptists are thus relatively Important there, the 
first-named hardly more, perhaps, than in the East; 
the others certainly far more so. This may be 
explained by the activity of Methodist and Baptist 
missionaries In the West in days when the Episco- 
palians, for instance, were content with retaining a 
local foothold. Some denominations common In the 
East are known little or not at all In the West, and 
vice versa. For Instance, the Dutch Reformed church, 



146 The Different West 

so familiar In New York and New Jersey, Is practi- 
cally unknown there. Congregationalism is a root 
transplanted from the East. One the other hand, 
the Christians, known only by name in the East, are 
strong in the West, numerically and socially. But, 
In general, It may be said that members of different 
religious communities are apt to meet on much more 
common social ground than in the East. I know 
many places In New England where a census of any 
representative social gathering would disclose hardly 
any others but Congregationalists and Episcopa- 
lians — the former in a majority. The presence of 
a Catholic would be almost an impossibility; that 
of a Baptist or a Methodist, very unlikely. A 
census of a similar gathering In the West would 
probably reveal, besides all the bodies named above. 
Christians, Swedenborgians, Lutherans, and so on. 
It need hardly be said that this difference has 
nothing whatever to do with religious tolerance or 
Intolerance. You will find the old first families of 
Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis largely 
Catholic not at all because public opinion in those 
cities leans toward the Catholic doctrine. The fact 
that you might live for years In a Connecticut town 
without meeting a Methodist socially, while half of 
your friends might be of that connection after your 
removal to a western city, does not mean that there 
is any religious prejudice against Methodists in New 



Absence of a Leisure Class 147 

England. These things have their causes, but they 
are only indirectly connected with religion. In a 
small New England town forty years ago, the only 
Catholics were Irish, and the only Irish were day- 
laborers. Hence, obviously, the social status of the 
Catholic church in such towns was humble. In the 
same towns, the Methodists and Baptists had to 
take the "leavings" of the population, while in the 
West they were first on the field. 

All denominations are more liberal in the West 
than in the East. By "liberal" I mean tolerant; 
I do not mean to imply that there is any general 
tendency toward free-thinking, although possibly 
there are more individual free-thinkers. But there 
seems to be more of the atmosphere of universal 
charity; less feeling that there is, and of necessity 
should be, a high board fence about one's own par- 
ticular denominational back-yard. If a practical 
movement for Christian unity should ever arise, we 
may well expect it to start in the Middle Western 
States. 

There is, apparently, no leisure class in the West. 
The ear-marks of such a class are almost entirely 
absent — the great estates, the peculiar type of club 
life in the cities, the efforts to invent strange forms 
of amusement or occupation — social entertainment, 
philanthropy, art, all gone to seed. Not that condi- 
tions do not produce those who might live in leisure 



148 The Different West 

if they so chose. But partly they do not so choose; 
and those who do choose go elsewhere to live, where 
the devices for supporting such a life, and for mak- 
ing it more supportable to those who live it, are 
already well-developed. There is little for a retired 
millionaire to do in Milwaukee, or Indianapolis, or 
Cincinnati, or even in St. Louis or Chicago. If he 
does not go abroad. New York usually claims him. 
To a certain extent this is to the credit of the western 
cities, the amusements of these self-expatriated gen- 
try being usually of a kind that their native places 
may well do without. So far, however, as it means 
that the West has no attractions for him who wishes 
to live the life of a quiet, cultivated gentleman, 
spending his money in the gratification of the best 
tastes, it is doubtless to be deplored. If the West 
can so order itself that these latter persons of leisure 
will remain, while the others will continue to emi- 
grate, all will be well. This is not at all beyond the 
bounds of possibility, and there are signs that it may 
one day be realized. 

Hospitality and neighborliness are far more 
noticeable in the West than in the East. Other 
things being equal, a new arrival may expect more 
attention there, arising simply from a desire to make 
him feel at home and to ensure that he receives a 
favorable impression. This sort of attention is 
rare in the East and is, unfortunately, becoming 



Club Life 149 

rarer, except in the case of European visitors. It 
is also rare in the East to receive attention simply 
because one lives near by. Nowhere, I suppose, 
is mere proximity of residence a reason for social 
intimacy, except perhaps in Alaska or Central 
Africa. But so far as I know, given the requisite 
social possibilities, nowhere in the East is residence 
in the same street a reason for social attentions, as 
it is not infrequently in the West. Is this due to 
the greater regard paid by westerners to the home 
and to domestic life? That such regard exists in 
special degree may be denied by easterners and even 
doubted by westerners themselves. Yet no one who 
observes the lack of forms of social life outside the 
home, in the West as compared with the East, can 
doubt. 

The West is full of clubs, but It has not the kind 
of club life that one sees In New York or Boston. 
In the city of St. Louis there Is not a single club 
with large windows opening directly on the street, 
where members may sit Idly and watch what goes 
on outside. There Is, Indeed, no street where things 
worth watching by such gazers are going on. The 
new University Club in Chicago, a magnificent and 
well-appointed building, looking its part perfectly 
(which is more than can be said of the misfit 
millionaire's palace that serves the same purpose 
in New York) has such windows, and doubtless they 



i^o The Different West 

will ultimately be occupied; but they have been 
empty whenever I have seen them. 

Throughout the West the clubs are organizations 
of the busy, not of the idle. Lunch clubs abound: 
places where you eat and at the same time listen 
to instructive discourses, thus killing a materialistic 
and an idealistic bird with the same gastronomic 
stone. Likewise are there dinner clubs galore: one 
could not belong to them all and keep his dinner 
average down to one a day. 

All this comes, of course, from the exodus of the 
leisured, which leaves only the busy. Millionaires 
are plenty — more so than in the East — but they 
are all the busy kind. Generally there is nothing 
visible to differentiate them from the citizen of 
moderate means. Consequently there is less about 
them In the papers, less vulgar curiosity, less toady- 
ing. This is surely natural and normal. The man 
with ten thousand dollars is in no way differentiated 
socially from the man with twenty thousand. Why 
should the man with a million be supposed to have 
stepped over the line? 

There is more local pride In the West than in 
the East, and at the same time it is less provincial 
than the eastern varieties. The Bostonian, for In- 
stance, has no warmth of affection for Boston, any 
more than you or I love to live on this earth in 
preference to Mars or the Moon. There is no 



Local Pride 151 



other place : that is all there Is to It. And the New 
Yorker (so far as there are any real ones), the 
Phlladelphlan, the Baltlmorean, entertain the same 
kind of feeling In a less Intense degree. It would 
be difficult to discover It In the West, and yet one 
may find there real love for a native city, of the 
kind that we give to relatives or dear friends. Fre- 
quently It blinds to faults — it could not do that were 
it not of a peculiar quality. 

" I have known citizens of Chicago as proud of 
Chicago," says Mr. Bryce, " as a Londoner in the 
days of Elizabeth was proud of London." That is 
to say, Elizabethan London had still some charac- 
teristics that we are pleased to consider "western." 
It occurs neither to the modern Londoner nor the 
modern New Yorker to be proud of his city. I 
remember hearing wild applause once In a college 
class In astronomy when the professor explained the 
conditions that made the moon a satellite of the 
Earth instead of some other planet. The boys 
"wooded up," as they used to call it, because "we" 
had succeeded in keeping the moon. A good deal of 
city pride Is on much the same basis, being founded 
on the city's climate, or situation, or on growth or 
characteristics that are purely the result of these — 
not the outcome of any effort whatever on the part 
of the citizens. One may be glad and happy because 
he lives on a beautiful river or "a mile high" in 



152 The Different West 

the air; but why should he be proud of it? Pride 
should be reserved for an efficient and honest govern- 
ment, ideal housing conditions, a low death rate, 
prosperous churches, good schools, beautiful streets 
and parks — things created or brought about by the 
conscious action, industry and good taste of the citi- 
zens. Be that as it may, pride of this kind is essen- 
tially western, and in some cases it is assumed that 
if we start out with the pride the conditions that 
ought to stimulate the pride will follow. This may 
be a correct assumption. Civic pride has often been 
the precursor of civic beauty and efficiency. On the 
other hand, an ignorant pride is often the very 
thing that stops the wheels of progress — the "good 
enough for me" sort of feeling. 

To sum up, the social scale exists in the United 
States, but, outside of the purposes for which it 
exists, it makes little difference. Furthermore, it 
is both elastic and fluid; individuals and families 
rapidly pass up and down it. And in the West it 
matters less than in the East. Within its own sphere 
it is quite as powerful and important in one region 
as in the other, but its claims to reach beyond that 
sphere are not so much insisted upon or so fre- 
quently regarded as valid. 

The choice of one's social acquaintance is a good 
deal like shopping. If the shopper is not a good 
judge of what he wants, It will be best for him to 



Social Selections 153 

go to some place of high repute, where he may be 
perfectly sure of the quality of anything that he may 
buy. But if he has good judgment he may get better 
results at far less cost by selecting what he wants 
wherever he may find it. So, if he is not quite sure 
of his social judgment, he had better frequent a 
social clique whose members will be sure to satisfy 
his needs, while if he knows real gentlefolk when he 
meets them he will not hesitate to select them for 
his associates, no matter where or In what sur- 
roundings he may discover them. 

This is what the westerner does, more frequently 
than the easterner, and it bears testimony to his 
greater confidence in his own ability to select satis- 
factory associates. 



CHAPTER XII 

SOURCES OF THE WEST'S POPULATION 

EVERYONE in the West has relationships with 
other parts of the country. Each will tell you 
that his people came from New England, or Penn- 
sylvania, or Virginia; or perhaps from Germany or 
France. In many cases, personal relations are main- 
tained with the family in the East or the South, 
perhaps for several generations, and many families 
have summer homes in the state or region of their 
fathers. This tends somewhat toward keeping dis- 
tinct those parts of the population that have different 
sources, and various accidents have emphasized this 
tendency, such as the civil war, which was strongly 
felt as a separating influence between those of north- 
ern and of southern origin. Emigration from the 
East followed parallels of latitude pretty closely, 
but an extension of Mason and Dixon's line would 
cut across many of the Western States, and the 
population below that line has always been predomi- 
nantly southern. 

In southern Illinois and Indiana, this southern 
origin gave rise during the war to organizations 
like the Knights of the Golden Circle, and was pro- 

154 



Non-English Races 155 

ductive of much sympathy with the South. Indeed, 
the memories of the civil war have not died out in 
this part of the West as they have in the East. If 
one were roughly to estimate the share that each 
element has contributed to western life, it might be 
said that southern emigration has contributed charm, 
grace, hospitality, and breeding, and with it a cer- 
tain turbulence and quickness of temper; while the 
northern element has brought business ability, in- 
terest in civic improvement, with a settling and 
steadying influence; and the various foreign contin- 
gents, each its native qualities in greater or less 
degree. One may expect to find the citizens of 
southern ancestry genial, popular, well-bred, and 
occupying a recognized social position; the man of 
northern origin, well-to-do, though perhaps not 
wealthy, and active in all civic movements ; the Ger- 
man, prosperous, often to the point of amassing 
great wealth, politically active, and very conserva- 
tive, even when this attitude puts him into opposition 
with obviously needed reforms. 

Exceptions will occur to all, and possibly the im- 
possible has been attempted in making so broad a 
generalization as that sketched above. 

Persons of other than English descent, settled in 
the West, Include many of races somewhat unfa- 
miliar in the East, including French, Spanish, and 
Scandinavians. There are also Indians in somewhat 



156 The Different West 

greater number than in the East. Other races, 
famihar in the East, such as the Germans, are par- 
ticularly strong in certain cities, such as Milwau- 
kee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, and have materially 
affected those cities, both in outward aspect and in 
the customs of commerce and society. 

The Hebrew is hardly as numerous in the West 
as in the East: on this account, doubtless, he is 
more esteemed and treated with greater friendliness. 
Although a "dispersed" race, the Jews have never 
been willing emigrants — they have been forced 
abroad by racial and economic conditions. And 
they stop at once in the place where such conditions 
are favorable, settling quickly down as a precipitate 
settles when the liquid that carries it is no longer 
agitated. New York is the port of entry, and so 
New York has the greatest Jewish population that 
has ever gathered in one city since the days of 
Abraham. 

There have always been two kinds of Jews — 
those friendly to foreign customs, modes of thoughts 
and relationships, and those who keep sternly, even 
fanatically, to themselves. The former, the "Hel- 
lenizing" Jews of the ancient world, are represented 
in modern days by the great and familiar Jewish 
names — the Disraelis, the Rothschilds, and so on — 
in the United States by names that will occur to all; 
men none the less proud of their Hebrew heritage 



Two Kinds of Jews 157 

because they are willing and anxious to work shoul- 
der to shoulder with their comrades of other faiths 
and races for education, for civic betterment, for 
righteousness in general. The latter are repre- 
sented by the severely orthodox Jews of Poland and 
Russia who have been driven to our shores of recent 
years. In the West, If we may be rash enough to 
attempt a generalization, here also the former type 
of Jew is proportionately stronger than in the East. 

The French were, of course, masters of the soil 
in all the states carved out of the original Louisiana 
Purchase. They show various degrees of persist" 
ency as their original conditions of life have been 
retained or changed. The difference between a 
French and an English colony is very much like 
that between a cultivated plant and a weed. The 
weed grows in spite of you ; you can't stop it. The 
cultivated plant often shows remarkable results, but 
these are proportioned to your efforts to adapt con- 
ditions to it; leave It alone and it will deteriorate, 
and if there are weeds about they will choke it off 
and soon have the field all to themselves. 

It is unnecessary to say that in comparing the 
English colonies to weeds, I have reference only 
to their power of growth without anyone's fostering 
care and in the teeth of all sorts of difficulties. 

There are two places on the American continent 
where the French civilization persists — in French 



158 The Different West 

Canada and In Louisiana. Elsewhere it has practi- 
cally disappeared, either wholly so, or Is on its way. 
Even in Louisiana it is losing its hold. Now, it is 
precisely in French Canada that the conditions favor- 
able to the French have been somewhat artificially 
maintained by law. If it had not been so, the French 
plant would have been choked by the English as it 
has elsewhere. In Louisiana many of the old condi- 
tions have also been retained — the plant has been 
cultivated, but not so sedulously. From this we may 
drop through some of the old Missouri towns like 
St. Genevieve, through St. Louis to Vincennes, Ind., 
or Cahokia, 111., where the French occupation is but 
a name. Perhaps the French survivals in parts of 
the country where one has to search for them some- 
what sedulously are more interesting than the full- 
fledged civilization, for they throw some light on 
the processes of amalgamation. Intermarriage is, 
of course, a potent cause. All through the West 
one sees French faces with English or German 
names. But where two or three generations may 
suffice to make a Teutonic American, they do not 
suffice to make a Protestant. The Catholic faith 
has proved the most permanent element of the Latin 
influence. 

The newcomer will be told, to his astonishment, 
in various parts of the West, that the Richardsons 



French Relics 159 



or the Joneses, or some others with an equally non- 
Gallic name, are " old French families." These and 
others, where the names as well as the ancestry are 
French, used, not so long ago, to send their children 
to Paris to be educated; now, in many cases, they 
are unable even to speak or to understand the tongue 
of their fathers; but they do cling to the ancestral 
church, and it is to this fact that the sustained in- 
fluence of that church is due. In communities where 
all other evidence of Latin origin is fast fading 
away. 

Western place-names are very apt to tell the story 
of early French occupation. They have been largely 
retained, seldom translated; but their pronunciation 
has generally been ruthlessly anglicized, sometimes 
barbarously so. This sort of process is in the hands 
of the unlearned part of the community, not of the 
scholars. If the latter controlled it, the foreign pro- 
nunciation would doubtless be retained. As it is, the 
French street names in St. Louis, for instance, are at 
the mercy of the street-car conductors, and what 
they say goes. What is the use of telling a con- 
ductor that you want to get out at De Baliviere 
Avenue, when he calls it " De Bolivar" and would 
not know what you meant? You must use his pro- 
nunciation, and it soon becomes the accepted form. 
So Terre Haute, Ind., becomes "Terry Hut," and 



l6o The D liferent West 

so It goes. The same thing has been done over and 
over again in the Mother Country, with its " Beech- 
urns," its " Chumleys," and all the rest. 

How do you suppose the French feel about it, 
or would feel if they ever bothered to notice any- 
thing outside of La Belle? We Anglo-Saxons have 
never had a similar experience. Owing to our bull- 
dog grip on places that we have once laid hold on, 
we have never seen our local names made Into hash 
by a subsequent owner. How should we feel if one 
of the Pacific States, we will say, fell Into the hands 
of the Japanese, who proceeded to pronounce all our 
names In their own fashion? 

As an example of the persistence of Latin Influ- 
ence In ways that are unheeded by those who have 
not studied them, we may take the way In which the 
street systems of some western cities depend on early 
French colonial customs. When French colonists 
laid out a town they provided, well outside of its 
limits, land for "commons" and for "common 
fields" — the former a huge open corral for grazing 
animals, and the latter a tract to be divided Into 
strips and apportioned for cultivation. As the town 
grew it often became necessary to lay out other 
tracts of land for "common fields," and not Infre- 
quently the town Itself overran all these In Its fur- 
ther growth. In this case the streets there laid out 
were conformed to the original boundary lines of 



The Germans i6i 



the tracts, so that these tracts still show clearly on 
the maps, a century after their original functions 
have been forgotten. Of course, the same thing 
happens where city growth overtakes and swallows 
up small towns with street systems of their own; 
but In the cases described there never were settle- 
ments on these tracts, and some remain still largely 
unbuilt upon, while no effort is made to alter their 
original lines. These facts have recently been 
brought out in a pamphlet on Real Estate Titles 
in St. Louis, In which the author, Mr. McCune 
Gill, shows by means of a map the location of the 
various commons and common fields within the 
present limits of that city and the dependence of 
the present street systems on their situation and 
orientation. 

There is an old newspaper joke about a traveler 
who looks out of the window from his Pullman 
berth and, seeing buildings covered with such names 
as Rauschenpfeffer, Steinenflasch, etc., says: "Oh; 
I see we have arrived in Milwaukee!" When the 
Kaiser politely asked the visiting American, " Is 
this your first visit to Germany?" and he replied, 
"No, your Majesty, I have been In St. Louis, Cin- 
cinnati, and Milwaukee," he made the same jest in 
a different form — in fact, it is quite Protean. The 
size of the German Immigration to the United 
States, Its coherence, and the solid contributions it 



1 62 The D liferent West 

has made to our prosperity, are more or less familiar 
to all. The Germans have probably kept together a 
little better in the West than elsewhere. Great 
German quarters like South St. Louis or the "Over 
the Rhine" district in Cincinnati are more frequent 
there — in fact, there is hardly one of these In the 
East at all except the Second Avenue district in New 
York, which is now rapidly breaking up. Foreign 
immigrants, when they enter a strange city in any 
numbers, are apt to "flock together" at first, but 
as the strangeness wears off they usually disperse. 
In the West there seem to have been special reasons 
for keeping the Germans together. In St. Louis, 
for instance, the fact that they adhered to the Union 
in 1 86 1, while the rest of the citizens largely favored 
secession, must have inclined them to solidarity. 

The tendency of nationalities to congregate in 
large cities has already been noted. To a lesser 
extent and under favorable conditions this is done 
also in the country. A case In point is the German 
colonization of parts of Pennsylvania, giving rise 
to the Pennsylvania "Dutch" of the present day, 
with their Interesting and remarkable preservation 
of language, religion, and customs. An equally 
interesting Instance Is that of the great Scandinavian 
farming region in the northern part of the group of 
States that we have elected here to consider as " The 
West" — notably in Minnesota and the Dakotas. 



The Scandinavians 163 

These people are unfamiliar to the East. Plays 
based on their peculiarities, books, and newspaper 
paragraphs In their dialect, were largely unintelli- 
gible to easterners; and they still are so, in large 
part, although the average New Yorker or Bos- 
tonlan now knows, at second hand, that the Scandi- 
navian says "Yon" for "John" and "I ban" for 
"I am." The Scandinavian farmer is one of the 
very best assets of the West, and his steadying 
Influence Is felt all along the line where he has been 
present to exert it, from law-making down to the 
cultivation of the soil. 

The Scandinavian is a north-Teuton who has been 
remote from Latin Influence, and in this respect 
he is racially near to our own ancestors — Jutes, 
Saxons, and Angles. This may be one reason why 
he becomes so quickly naturalized here, and why he 
Is, on the whole, so well liked. He has a peculiarly 
pleasing, Ingratiating manner, from which all trace 
of trying to curry favor is absent, and which com- 
bines the simple-heartedness of a child with hard- 
headed common -sense and ability to succeed In 
practical matters. 

The Indian Is no more noticeable In the West 
than he Is in the East, except in Oklahoma. So far 
as the uncivilized or "blanket" Indian Is concerned, 
he can be dropped out of consideration, as bearing 
no part in the life of the region. The civilized 



164 The Different West 

Indian of Oklahoma, however, has relations with 
the rest of the population similar to those of any 
other non-Teutonic race, with the addition that he is 
conscious of his position as one of the aboriginal 
inhabitants of the country. Many easterners, visit- 
ing the larger cities of Oklahoma, look in vain for 
Indians in blankets and feathers, stalking about the 
streets. The Indians are usually there, but no more 
distinguishable from other citizens than are mem- 
bers of any non-Teutonic race. We may reasonably 
expect an absorption of these Indians Into the gen- 
eral population at least as rapidly as that of the 
Latin races. As for the "blanket Indian," he must 
go — either by dying out or by joining the ranks 
of the civilized. 

As for the negro, his problem Is strung along 
lines that run north and south, not east and west. 
Hardly anything that might be said on aspects of 
this problem applies distinctively to the West as a 
region. South of an extension of Mason and 
Dixon's line the colored element in the population 
is numerous and important; north of It that element 
may be almost absent. A recent English traveler 
quotes an Indiana woman as saying, when she saw 
four negroes walking down the street, that she had 
never before seen so many colored men together. 
In some parts of that State it would be surely impos- 
sible to make such a remark. 



The Fusing Ground 165 

A comparison of the western with the purely 
southern negro would probably show that the former 
has imbibed more or less of the independent spirit of 
the West. This is said to have been the case even 
in slave states before the abolition of slavery. Com- 
parison of reminiscences between Virginians and 
Missourians shows that, at least in many cases, the 
Missouri slaves were not under as strict discipline 
as the Virginian, and that they were really more 
independent and harder to manage. 

Perhaps, in closing this chapter, we may make a 
generalization even broader than that attempted, 
perhaps unsuccessfully, above, with the danger of 
Incurring more severe and equally just criticism. The 
population in the West does not seem so homoge- 
neous as that in the East. Its components have not, 
to so great an extent, forgotten their sources; even 
the frankly foreign elements are more clannish and 
have not mingled so freely with the rest of the 
people. This is due partly to the fact that there 
has not been so much time for mixing, partly to 
conditions inherent in western life, and doubtless, 
also, to accidents, pure and simple. The great 
Middle West has been called " the fusing ground," 
and fusion is by no means an instantaneous process. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE SPEECH AND MANNERS OF THE WEST 

"TXURING my first visit to the regions west of 
■■--^ the Mississippi, I attended a reception in an 
Interior Missouri town, where I met many of the 
townspeople — and charming people they were. 
"Are you from the East?" said one of them to me. 
"How odd! Eastern people always have an ac- 
cent; and you talk as if you had been born and 
brought up in the Mississippi Valley!" I was not 
insensible to the compliment; but indeed it was not 
a compliment to me or to the speaker, but to the 
mass of educated Americans. We have been too 
fast and furiously mixed and jostled for the effective 
formation of real local dialects. Yet differences 
exist, and they are characteristic — so much so that 
In the Manual of the Boy Scouts an attempt is made 
to teach the new-caught "tenderfoot" to distinguish 
the origin of the casual stranger by his speech. In 
the Official Handbook we learn, among other 
things, from the somewhat remarkable section on 
"American Dialects" (p. 139), that Callfornians 
always say 'Frisco for San Francisco; that an accent 
on the first syllable of the second word In New 

166 



American '^Dialects" 167 

Orleans indicates a Louisianian; that persons from 
the Gulf States called Carolina "Cahline;" that 
Chicagoans say "hef " for half and "kef" for calf, 
and that the inhabitants of Toronto call it " Tranto." 
Boy scouts who pin their faith to all this will prob- 
ably make mistakes; yet it is often possible to detect 
locality by the combination of several such signs. 

The author of one of the latest books on the 
United States, Annette M. B. Meakin,* writes: 

Long before I ever set foot in the New World, I had 
met, socially, Americans from every part of the United 
States, and I remember that I often prided myself on the 
certainty with which I was able to guess, after a few 
minutes' conversation, the part of his continent from 
which an American came. I mention this particularly 
because I have several times seen it stated by American 
writers of the twentieth century that all educated Amer- 
icans speak exactly alike. 

It is, indeed, not hard to tell the southerner from 
the New Englander, yet the South Carolinian does 
not talk like the Georgian, nor either like the Vir- 
ginian; and there is an equally noticeable difference 
between the speech of men from Maine, Massachu- 
setts, and Connecticut. Likewise, the Missourian, 
the Illinoisan, and the MInnesotan do not talk ex- 
actly alike, but it ought to be possible to differentiate 
the speech of the three, taken collectively, from that 
of the New Englander or the southerner. It is pos- 

* What America Is Doing. London, 191 1. 



i68 The Different West 

sible, though not easy; because the New Englander 
and the southerner have been well settled in their 
respective domains for centuries, while the west- 
erner, in some cases, has scarcely had time to look 
about him. Here again we may fall back on our 
old analogy of the Englishman and the American. 
Beyond the so-called "American voice," which is 
largely a matter of pitch and quality, the English- 
man notes especially in the American speech a cer- 
tain hardness, a tendency to multiply secondary 
accents or to accent every syllable. The American 
can scarcely do without his secondary accents, while 
the Englishman rarely bothers with them, even when 
his word has many syllables. Thus the Englishman 
can and does pronounce the word "interesting" 
with only one accent — that on the first syllable; 
most Americans find it necessary to accent both first 
and third, some giving the primary stress to one 
and some to the other. Disyllabic words like " Free- 
dom " or "instant" he often speaks with so even a 
stress that to the English ear he appears to give a 
primary accent to the ultimate syllable. This pecul- 
iarity brings with it that of oftener giving vowels 
their true value, for the tendency is to pronounce 
all unaccented syllables with the neutral vowel-sound 
{tih) . The more accents we give, the less of this 
there is. Hence, the Englishman seems to us to 
hurry and slur his syllables, and we appear to him 



Syllabic Stress 169 



to talk with undue stress and to bring out vowel- 
sounds with an offensive plainness that amounts to 
crudeness. 

Now, if the westerners have any trick of speech 
in common, it is doubtless this tendency to syllabic 
stress — those who do not use it would call it "un- 
due," while those who do would term it "normal" 
or " proper." The dwelling upon the sound of " r," 
which is as noticeable to the Bostonian as the latter's 
utter neglect of it is west of the AUeghanies, is 
merely a special case. "Isn't it a pity," said an 
eastern lady, "that so many western women, other- 
wise educated and acceptable, pronounce their r's 
in such an impossible manner 1" If to recognize 
this useful letter with too much empressement Is the 
hall-mark of "impossibility," what shall we call the 
stony stare of non-recognition when accorded to it? 
This is merely a case of the general difference of 
stress, noted above. 

One may follow the dictionaries and talk In either 
way. These are ^.r/r«-dictionary, or perhaps supra- 
dictionary matters, and belong to the niceties of 
speech where custom reigns supreme. When the 
West has been settled as long as the South, its minor 
peculiarities of speech will be cultivated svith pride, 
as are the southerner's, and no one will dare to 
comment on them. 

In Professor Lounsbury's interesting attempt to 



lyo The Different West 

discover whether our early lexicographers had the 
necessary knowledge of polite speech to entitle them 
to give evidence of what it was in their time, he 
concludes that many of them were hardly compe- 
tent witnesses. In the early " one-man " dictionaries 
the most that one may conclude from the fact that 
a given pronunciation is preferred, is that the author 
was personally familiar with it and that it prevailed 
in the society that he frequented, whatever that 
might be. There is no such limitation on his spell- 
ings, because these are matters of recorded speech 
and circulate too widely to be local. There was no 
way of recording pronunciation accurately before the 
invention of the phonograph. With its increasing 
use, the records of voices may travel as far and as 
wide as those of written speech. 

There are, however, no more "one-man" diction- 
aries. Our present works of reference are compila- 
tions and collaborations. Whatever errors they 
contain are due to haste and to the fact that too 
many cooks spoil the broth — they are rarely local 
or provincial. Local and provincial uses are re- 
corded, but they are plainly marked as such. And 
there has even been an effort to distinguish between 
the usage of sections; one word may be marked 
"Western U. S." or even "Illinois" or "Indiana." 
This has rarely been done with painstaking care, 
and one would err as greatly in relying upon the 



American and English Speech ijl 

dictionaries for his western " dialect " as if he pinned 
his faith to the Boy Scout rules mentioned above. 

I have alluded in an earlier chapter to the good 
lady who regarded whatever she heard in Waltham 
as typical of Massachusetts. In Clifton Johnson's 
interesting compilation entitled "What They Say 
in New England," he has included many western 
and southern sayings and customs that he no- 
ticed among transplanted families — purely exotic 
growths. And it is very difficult to distinguish. On 
a visit to the Northwest coast in 19 lo, I heard for 
the first time the expression " a good buy," meaning 
a bargain. It seemed to be In general use there. 
But in 191 1 I saw the same phrase in an advertise- 
ment in an eastern newspaper. Was the advertiser 
a man from Seattle or Portland? Or is the expres- 
sion old slang, used locally and occasionally all over 
the country, which had merely found congenial soil 
for multiplication in the Northwest? In an English 
novel written some time ago a mother reproves her 
daughter for using the word " fad," which she 
characterizes as "horrible American slang." Now, 
at this time the word was totally unknown in 
America, and, although we have now adopted it, 
its origin is purely British. The English regard 
this country as the fountain-head of slang and think 
that our speech consists of it exclusively — an 
opinion fostered by the works of Mr. George Ade 



172 The D liferent West 

and likely to be confirmed by the Arctic explorations 
of Mr. George Borup. 

To revert for a moment to the differences between 
written and spoken language, our education regards 
the latter too little. It is the mark of a well-educated 
community that the two forms keep pretty closely 
together, without coalescing. No one wants to talk 
exactly like a book, nor does he care to sprinkle his 
writing with slang and colloquialisms. Yet it Is 
undesirable that the two should drift so far apart 
that they really constitute two dialects, as they do 
in some parts of the world. Now we lay great stress 
on correct writing in our system of education, and 
little on correct speaking. The chief idea that some 
of us have of the latter is that it is an exact copy of 
correct writing. This results in what has been called 
" schoolmarm's English;" it Induces well-meaning 
persons to say, "Are you not going? " and " I offered 
him a slight recompense," and to use hundreds of 
other similar phrases. Children are not taught, 
either In school or at home, to talk In correct collo- 
quial English, and It Is never even hinted to them 
that the quality or tone of voice In which they speak 
means as much, and Is as Important, as the words 
they use. 

Some persons awaken to this In after-life and try 
to alter their voices, with the result that they talk 



Education of Speech 173 



artificially, like actors. This sort of thing must be 
learned in childhood or not at all. 

It is commonly said that the English have better 
speaking voices than we do. There is not much to 
choose between the best American and the best 
English voices; likewise, the bad ones among them 
compare unfavorably with our worst. The Amer- 
ican, says G. W. Steevens, often talks English " with 
a clarity of pronunciation that puts me again and 
again to shame." But it is undeniable that a larger 
proportion of them than of us speak with a pleasant 
and acceptable intonation. Between the so-called 
"haw-haw" speech, which is ridiculed in England 
as much as it is here, and the extreme American 
nasal tone, it would be hard to choose. We are 
told that the pessimist, when confronted with two 
evils, takes both. In like manner, he who is anxious 
to compare English with American manners is fond 
of taking both these extremes as typical. For his 
own purposes he is right, of course; but as a matter 
of fact the cultivated Englishman and the cultivated 
American talk a good deal alike. 

This education of speech has probably gone fur- 
ther in the East than in the West. It is a matter of 
home training and, above all, of example, rather 
than of school discipline. The pleasantest qualities 
of voice that we have are to be found in Maine and 



174 The D iff ere fit IF est 

Virginia — slow and distinct in enunciation, sweet In 
intonation. In neither state are children taught in 
the schools how to speak. The persons who talk 
as I have described are never In a hurry (south of 
Washington and north of Boston, time has no value) 
and they would not be accounted typical Americans 
of the "hustling" variety. Is It possible that a 
rasping, metallic, high-pitched intonation has some 
connection with business energy? 

If so, we must not soon look for Its discontinuance. 
It has been suggested that it is the result of our dry, 
harsh climate; but the softness of both the Maine 
and the Virginia voices would seem to negative this 
idea. 

When our attention is called to a thing and we 
are convinced that it needs mending, we usually 
mend It. I look, therefore, to see that Increased care 
in the training of children to speak, and in giving 
them desirable models to imitate at home, will ulti- 
mately overcome whatever racial and climatic in- 
fluences may be drawing us in the other direction, 
and will give to all of us the pleasant mode of speech 
that some of us have already. So much for speech. 
In regard to manners, the German lady, quoted by 
Bryce, who thought American women in the West 
were "fiirchtbar fret iind fiirchthar fromm," could 
not have been more astonished at either of these 
phases than the average eastern visitor is apt to 



Chaperonage 175 

be on occasion. For the East has been taking on 
European customs. Fifty years ago, East and West 
were alike in practically rejecting any system of 
chaperonage whatever. It was customary, for in- 
stance, for a young woman to go alone to the theater 
with a young man. Today this is vastly less com- 
mon in the East than in the West. Whether the 
West will follow suit can hardly be said as yet; but it 
is surely amusing to witness the horror of certain 
good eastern ladies at customs which were those of 
the East itself in their own girlhood, or, at any rate, 
in that of their mothers. 

Westerners are still able to analyze the meaning 
of chaperonage in such cases as this, and to apply a 
little common-sense to it. If a young man and a 
young woman must always be accompanied by an 
older person, the functions of the latter must evi- 
dently be either to prevent the young woman from 
acting with impropriety, or to protect her from the 
young man. The westerners think they know their 
young people ; and I believe that they do. Easterners 
used to think so too; why have they changed? Not 
because the young people have altered, but solely, 
I believe, in response to the dictates of fashion. This 
is unfortunate, and it is having a bad effect on eastern 
women. They are vastly less unconscious of their 
sex than the western woman. In the West, a man 
and woman, both well bred, will fall into conversa- 



176 The Different West 

tlon on a train, just as two men would do; where 
an eastern woman would not think of doing or suf- 
fering such an indignity. In the West, almost alone 
among American regions, does it now seem possible 
for a woman to forget that she is a woman and to 
regard herself merely as a human being. 

In his chapter on "The Temper of the West," 
written seventeen years ago, Bryce tells us of west- 
ern business men that "they rise early; they work 
all day; they have few pleasures, few opportunities 
for relaxation." To the first part of this indictment 
we may still plead guilty. The western business 
day does begin early. The young man who has 
been accustomed to drift into a New York or Boston 
office at 9 A.M. is surprised, on removing to Chicago 
or St. Louis, to find that his presence is expected 
at 7 :30. Working-hours, however, are no longer 
than in the East; the earlier arrival is offset by 
earlier departure, and the clerk gets time for recrea- 
tion in the afternoon — a most sensible plan. As for 
lack of pleasures and of opportunities for relaxa- 
tion. It is difficult to see where Mr. Bryce obtained 
his information on this point. Of course, the rec- 
reative value of this or that employment depends 
largely on the personal equation. The man who 
thinks that all time not spent on a schooner yacht 
is irrecoverably lost, can evidently not exist com- 
fortably in Indianapolis or Cincinnati. I once wit- 



Conclusion 177 



nessed a game of polo in the hills of Northwestern 
Connecticut. It was the funniest sight I ever saw. 
The ball reposed in the center of the field, while 
the players on both sides were trying to get their 
frantic mounts near enough to it to hit it. This 
convinced me that to play polo one needs polo 
ponies. So the man who knows of no recreation 
but polo will keep away from Litchfield County until 
the importation of his favorite beasts makes it more 
attractive. But all this is not to say that no one 
enjoys himself in Indianapolis, or Cincinnati, or in 
Litchfield, Conn. The fact is that the westerner, 
by reason of his free and easy disposition, his readi- 
ness to take things as they come, and to amuse 
himself in any way that offers, is peculiarly easy 
to entertain, and self-entertainment becomes with 
him a simple task. 

It may be well, in closing this somewhat dis- 
cursive account of things whose very obviousness 
may make their perusal amusing to some and im- 
possible to others, to emphasize the fact that the 
increasing standardization of the elements of our 
national civilization, noted by more than one ob- 
server, never can make for a dead-level of uni- 
formity. Mayor Gaynor of New York, in a recent 
address, asserted that the school children of that 
city are acquiring "uniform minds," and as a conse- 



178 The Different West 

quence are growing to have " uniform faces." Prince 
Henry of Prussia noted that what may be called a 
"university type" of face prevails among our college 
students. By the methods of craniometry and phys- 
ical measurement it has been established that the 
diverse elements of our population are really grow- 
ing alike. Yet the more the general features, phys- 
ical or intellectual, approach each other, the more 
noticeable minor differences become, and where 
there are differences that can not be obliterated, such 
as those of topography and climate, these will con- 
tinue to be reflected in the regional habits and 
character. 

We may expect, then, that there will always be 
an East and a West, until that time when, as the 
poet says: 

Earth and sky meet presently 
At God's great judgment seat. 

That both will so bear themselves as to be able on 
that day to render a good account of their peculiar 
gifts and of the way in which each has used them, 
neither the eastern nor the western reader of these 
pages will, I am sure, have any doubt. 



INDEX 



Accent, American, i68 

Adams, artist of " Hoosier 

Group," 129 
Ade, George, use of slang by, 

Agriculture, scientific, 115 
Alton, III., a hilly town, 12 
Alumni associations, 89 
American bottoms, the, 13 
American voice, 168 
Americans, in British novels, 2 
Amusements in the West, 176 
Anglo-Saxon local names, 160 
Anglo-Saxons not artists, 123 
Antiquities in the West, 124 
Architecture in the West, 124 
Arizona, constitution of, TZ 
Art in the West, 123 ; exhibi- 
tions, 126; museums, 127; in- 
struction in the West, 136 
Artists' Guild, St. Louis, 128 
Arts and crafts movement, 128 
Authors' Club, N. Y., 128 

Baptist Church, 145 

Beaux-Arts architecture, 125 

Bellman, The, Minneapolis, 103 

Bicknell, Frank M., article by, 2 

Blaine, J. G., candidacy of, 52 

Bluffs and prairies, 11 

Borup, George, use of slang by, 
171 

Boston, assumed primacy of, 
45 ; former literary suprem- 
acy, 95; local feeling in, 150; 
publishers in, 99; speech of, 
169 

Boston Transcript, 104, no 

Bottom lands, 1 1 



Boy Scouts, 166 
Bronx, growth of, 29 
Brigandage in the West, 63 
Bryan, W. J., 53, 57; as editor, 

103 
Bryant, William Cullen, 97 
Bryce, James, quoted, 2^, 63, 

80, 104, 151, 174, 176 
Business habits, western, 176 

Cahokia, 111., 13, 158 
California, irrigation in, 116 
Canada, French in, 158 
Catholic Church, 124; in Mary- 
land, 144; in Mississippi val- 
ley, 145; in the West, 158 
" Central States," 8 
Ceremony, growth of, 84 
Chaperonage in the West, 175 
Chauvenet, William, 108 
Chicago, 105 ; Art Museum, 
127 ; as a publishing centre, 
99; clubs in, 149; field-houses, 
34, 81 ; local pride in, 151 ; 
playgrounds, 34, 81 ; Univer- 
sity of, 82, 91 ; Yale scholar- 
ships in, 90. 
Chicago River in art, 129 
Chicago-St. Louis railway serv- 
ice, 119 
Chinese curiosity, 38 
Christian Church, 146 
Churches, established, 144 
Churchill, Winston, 37, 97 
Cincinnati, Germans in, 161 
City Club, St. Louis, 10 
City clubs, 55 
City plans, 54 
Civic pride, 152 



179 



i8o 



Index 



Civil War, effect on democracy, 
56; memories of, 155; Ger- 
mans in, 162 
Civilizations, old and new, 28 
Cleveland, Grover, candidacy of, 

52 
Cleveland Public Library, 94 
Climate, western, 17 
Clubs in the West, 149 
Clusman, Chicago artist, 129 
Coal, hard and soft, 117 
Co-education, 86 
College "yells," 86 
Colleges, see Universities 
Collier, Price, quoted, 143 
Colonies, French, 160 
Colonizers and colonized, 32 
Commoner, The, Lincoln, Neb., 

103 , . 

Commons in French colonies, 

160 
Competition, railway. 119 
Congregational Church, 144, 146 
Connecticut, established church 

in, 144 
Constabulary, need for, 64 
Constitutions, " freak," 70 
Crops in the West, 16 
Cummins, Senator, 53 
Curiosity of Yankees, 38 
Cyclones, 18 

Dakotas, Scandinavians in, 162 
Davis, R. H., quoted, 25 
Democracy, East and West, 56; 

in education, 83 
Dialects, American, 167 
Dictionaries, pronunciation in, 

170 
Drama in the West, 134 
Dutch Reformed Church, 145 

Economic unrest, 66 
Education and manners, 30; 
extra-scholastic, 92; in the 



West, 80; in speaking, 173; 

musical and artistic, 137 
English accent, 168 
Electric roads, interurban, 21 
Episcopal Church, 144 
European customs, 175 

Faculty, social attitude of, 87 

Farmer, as a debtor, 67 

Farms. 20 

Federal secret service, 65 ; treat- 
ment of train-robbery, 65 

Field-houses in Chicago, 34,81 

" First Lady in the Land," 142 

Forsyth, artist of " Hoosier 
Group," 129 

French element in the West, 
123, 157 

Friends, Society of, in Pennsyl- 
vania, 144 

" Frisco " Railroad, 121 

Gas as fuel, 117 

Gaynor, William J., quoted, 177 
German element in the West, 
155, 161 ; influence on music, 

133 
Giddings, Franklin H., quoted, 

59 
Gill, McCune, quoted, 161 
Gould railway interests, 78 
Greeley, Horace, nomination of, 

50 

Harriman railway interests, 78 
Harvard's college " yell," 86 
Harvest, 20 
Hearst, W. R., buys magazine, 

100 
Henry, O., quoted, 98 
Henry of Prussia, Prince, 

quoted, 178 
" Hoosier Group " of artists, 129 
Hopi Indians, 124 
Hospitality, western, 148 
Hours of work in the West, 176 



Index 



i8l 



Hughes, Charles E., 50 
Hysteresis, 33 

Illinois, southern element in, 154 

Illinois Traction Co., 22 

Imitation in American, Art, 130 

Impressionism in Art, 130 

" In Missoura," play, 136 

Income-tax, 75 

Indian art, 124 

Indians in the West, 163 

Indiana, negroes in, 164; south- 
ern element in, 154 

Indianapolis in art, 129; subur- 
ban terminal in, 22 

" Insurgents," 53 

Interurban roads, 21 

Intimacy, conditions of, 40 

Irish in New England, 147 

Irrigation, 115 

Irving, Washington, 95 

James brothers, bandits, 6^ 
Jews in the West, 156 
Journalism in the West, 100 
Judiciary, western, 71 

Kansas border warfare, 63; 
droughts in, 116; as the 
" Helot of politics," 70 

Kansas City boulevards, 34 

Keokuk dam, 114, 117 

Knights of the Golden Circle, 
1 54 

Labouchere, Henry, 103 
La Follette, Robert, 53 
La Follette's Weekly, 103 
Language, spoken and written, 

172 
Law, untenable theory of, y2 
Legislation against smoke, 118 
Leisure class, absence of, 147 
Levees, 15 
Libraries, 93 
Litchfield, Conn., 177 



Literature in the West, 95 ; is- 
sued by railways, 120 
Local pride, western, 150 
Louisiana, French in, 158 
Lounsbury, Prof., quoted, 169 
Lowell's " certain condescen- 
sion," 22, 
Lummis, Charles F., quoted, 34 
" Luck," defined, 62 
Lutheran Church, 146 

McKinley-Bryan campaign, 61 
Maine, intonation in, 173 
Manners of the West, 166 
Maryland, Catholics in, 144 
Meakin, Ohio artist, 129 
Meakin, A. M. B., quoted, 167 
Merriam, Professor, defeat for 

mayor, 54 
Methodist Church, 145 
Metropolitan museum, N. Y., 126 
Middle West, position of, 8 
Millionaires, western, 150 
Milwaukee, a German city, 161 : 

Public Library, 94; Socialist 

victory in, 70 
Minneapolis, Minn., 105 
Minnesota, Scandinavians in, 162 
Mirror, The, St. Louis, 103 
Missions in the West, 145 
Mississippi river, 114; in art, 129 
Missouri, slavery in, 165 
Missouri Pacific railroad, 121 
Mortgages on western farms, 67 
Mounds at Cahokia, 13 
Mugwump secession, 52 
Music in the West, 133 
Musical instruction in the West, 

137 

Napoleon, anecdote of, 62 
Nashville, Tenn., O. Henry's 

story of, 98 
National Academy of Fine Arts, 

126 
Natural gas, 117 



l82 



Index 



Navaho Indians, 124 
Nebraska, droughts in, 116; Uni- 
versity of, 137 
Negroes in the West,i64 
New countries, 28 
New England villages, 29 
New Hampshire, " insurgency " 

New Haven railroad, 122 
New Orleans, Catholics in, 145 
New York, 28; a city of out- 
siders, 96; as a publishing cen- 
tre, 99; as an art centre, 126; 
Authors' Club, 128; German 
district in, 162; Jews in, 156; 
literary group, 95 
New York Sun, 107, 109 
News, character of, in papers, 

106 
Newspapers, western, 100 
"Nigger," The, play, 136 
Night travel, 122 
Nipher, F. J., physicist, 108 
Norris, Frank, quoted, 97; on 

the rate question, 78 
Northern element in the West, 
155 

Occupation, social influence of, 

138 
Office-holders, social status ot, 

141 

Ohio in art, 129 

Oklahoma, constitution of, 70; 

Indians in, 163 
Oklahoma City, 25 
" One-night stands." I35 
"Over the Rhine," Cincinnati, 

162 

Pankhurst, Sylvia, in St. Louis, 

10 
Pavements in St. Louis, 34 
Pennsylvania " Dutch," 162 
Pennsylvania, Friends in, 144; 

sectionalism in, 48 



Periodicals in the West, 99 
Philadelphia as an art centre, 

126 ; publishers in, 99 
Pittsbugh, Pa., 117 
Place-names, French, 159 
" Places " in western cities, 21 
Playgrounds, 81 
Plutocracy in eastern colleges, 

90 
Police, necessity for state, 64 
Poe, Edgar A., 95 
Politics in the West, 47 
Popular Mechanics, 100 
Population, sources of, 154 
Populists, rise of, 53 
Post, Louis F., editor, 103 
Prairies, rolling, 12 
Presbyterian church, 145 
President, social status of, 141 
Professor and student, 88 
Progressive party, 53 _ _ 
Pronunciation, in dictionaries, 

170 
Public, The, Chicago, 103 
Public Libraries, 93, 107 
Public Library, Cleveland, 94; 

St. Louis, 120 
Public school in the West, 80 

Quincy, 111., 112 

Racial characteristics, 24 
Radicalism, eastern and western, 

Railways, comparison between, 
119; feeling against, 76; pe- 
culiarities of, 21 ; publicity 
literature, 100; rate-regula- 
tion, 76; speeds, 121 
Recall of judges, 73 
Recreation, facilities for, 81 
Reedy, William M., editor, 103 
Religion and social status, 144, 
Remington, Frederic, artist, 
129 



Index 



183 



Republicans, Liberal, in 1872, 50 
Ritualizing influences, 84 
River improvement, 112 
River transportation, yy 
Rivers in the West, 11 ; muddi- 

ness of, 14 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 53, 57, y6 ; 

attacks on judiciary, jz 
Rose, George, Impressions 

quoted, 48 



St. Anthony, Falls of, 114 

St. Genevieve, Mo., 158 

St. Louis, 105, 1 1 1, 1 14, 158 ; Acad- 
emy of Science, 108 ; Art Mu- 
seum, 127; Artists' Guild, 
128; Catholics in, 145; City 
Club of, 10; club life in, 149; 
defeat of new charter, 54; 
French names in, 159; Ger- 
mans in Civil War, 162; 
library co-operation with 
schools, 94; new residence 
district, 34; Public Library, 
120; real-estate titles in, 161; 
street-lighting in, 55 ; interur- 
ban terminal, 22 

St. Paul, Minn.. 105 

Salmagundi Club, N. Y., 128 

Scandinavian element in the 
West, 163 ; farmers, 162 

Scenery, American feeling for, 
122 

Science in the West, 108 

Sculpture in the West, 131 

Seattle, Wash., 105 

" Show-me" attitude, 60 

Silver question, 58 

Slang in the West, 171 

" Slogans " for cities, 105 

Smoke nuisance, 116 

Social scale, definition of, 139 

Socialism, 59; in Milwaukee, 70; 
successes of, 53 

Society in the West, 138 



Southern element in the West, 

154 . 
Speculation defined, 66 
Speech of the West, 166 
Speeds, on railways, 121 
Springfield Republican, 104 
Stark, artist of " Hoosier 

Group," 129 
State universities, future of, 91 
Steele, artist of " Hoosier 

Group," 129 
Steevens, G. W., quoted, 24,61, 

70, 173 
Street systems, French, 160 
Suburbs, western, 20 
Suggestion in art, 131 
Sumner, Wm. G., quoted, 83 
Supreme Court, U. S., 74 
Swedenborgian Church, 146 
Sylvester, Frederick, artist, 129 

Tacoma, Wash., 105 
Tammany, movements against, 

50 
Technical World Magazine, 100 
" Tenderloins," imitation, 54 
Terra Haute, Ind., 159 
Texas rangers, 64 
Theatre in the West, 134 
Tornadoes, western, 18 
Train robberies, 63 
Transportation problem, 76; by 

water, 112 
Trees, western, 16 
Trelease, William, botanist, 108 
Trusts, West and East, 68 

Union Pacific railroad, 121 
Universities, eastern, 51, 82; 
growth of western, 91 ; local 
and continental, 88 ; state, 34, 
82 
University Club, Chicago, 149 
University of Chicago, 82, 91 
University of Nebraska, 137 
University type of face, 178 



1 84 



Ind 



ex 



Villages in the West, 29 

Vincennes, Ind., 158 

Virginia, established church in, 
144; intonation in, 173; sla- 
very in, 165. 

"Wall Street," feeling against, 

68 
Water power, 114; supply, 1 10 
Watts, Mrs., Ohio writer, 97 
Weather in the West, 17 
West, meaning of the term, 6 
Wharf-boats, 15 
Whisky Insurrection, 47 
White, William Allen, writer, 97 
" Wild and Woolly " character- 
istics, 27 



Willis, N. P., 96 
Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 6^ 
Wisconsin University, 86 
Wixford, John, chemist, 1 1 1 
Woman's Clubs, 92 
World To-day, Hearst's pur- 
chase of, 100 

Yale University, anecdote of, 
52; ceremonies at, 84; college 
"yell," 86; scholarships in 
Chicago, 90 

Yankee, in English books, 38 

Zeliony, experiments of, 3 



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